Messages

41

General Mach Discussion / Re: 20 yr old cnc control needs replacement, and i need help.

« on: April 12, 2012, 09:49:36 PM »

i have completed 3 retrofits. 1 sajo vf54nc 1 bridgeport r2e4, and a hardinge chnc4. also built a plasma cnc. it is not that difficult. but it takes time. planning how to tackle the project.layout of the control cabinet. and chasing down all those electrical gremlins.   trying to do a retrofit on the cheap will give you grief. old wiring that  you think appear ok will have an intermittent break or oil has broken down the insulation.if the drives are analog i would replace with larken vipers or granite.gecko 320x might do.

42

General Mach Discussion / Re: Problem: Losing position if more than one axis wired up to breakout board

« on: April 12, 2012, 09:23:30 PM »

i would power the breakout board from the pc.

43

Feature Requests / Re: CV bad behaviour need improvement

« on: April 04, 2012, 12:28:35 PM »

so go use EMc then. or slow the feed down. use your machine within its limits.while i do not use a spindle, i cut with plasma at 6 meters per minute with no problems.

44

General Mach Discussion / Re: 2nd parallel port

« on: April 02, 2012, 12:15:23 PM »

what is the chipset of the netmos pp card? i have found that some dont work, or the driver needs to be different.

45

General Mach Discussion / Re: Corners not sharp when using a plasma

« on: March 30, 2012, 12:10:02 PM »

go to logic configuration screen , enter 89 as the number for stop cv, change cv tolerance to .1. this works for me.

46

PoKeys / Re: Pokeys 56U behaving erratically

« on: March 26, 2012, 12:20:16 PM »

 i had a similar problem. did you upgrade the pokeys recently? i had to go back to an older plugin. dont ask for help from Boris though. all you will get is insulting comments because the pokeys is  perfect and you are not!!

47

General Mach Discussion / Re: Smooth Stepper

« on: March 20, 2012, 12:01:23 PM »

i found that doing all your setup in ports and pins with the parallel ports and then cloning the settings to a smoothstepper profile makes getting the smoothstepper configured well. that is if you have a pc with 2 parallel ports.

48

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can Ipac only be used via ps2 with keygrabber?

« on: March 16, 2012, 09:49:50 AM »

i had used an ipac on a mill conversion. i did not use keygrabber. used scream4 and created my own shortcut keys. then programmed the ipac to input buttons . it worked out very well. one thing you must do is  install a small cap between the inputs and ground. i had  intermittent estops . dont remember the cap value. there is a post on the yahoo group about the ipac.

49

General Mach Discussion / Re: pulse frequency dro erratic

« on: March 11, 2012, 09:35:42 PM »

solved.  tried an older copy of xp pro with service pack 2. now have unwavering 24996 in the frequency dro. funny thing though. installed xp as apic computer and frequency is solid. tried optimising by changing to standard pc and frequency was erratic. changed back to apic computer and frequency is solid again.

solid state drive boots up in 15 seconds.
 
just a heads up to others having problems . dont update to xp service pack3.

50

General Mach Discussion / pulse frequency dro erratic

« on: March 09, 2012, 10:27:01 PM »

i have been using foxconn d425 atom motherboard with 1.8 gz , onboard video  and 1 g ram for the last 2 years with mach3 running a plasma cutter. always had good pulse frequency showing in the dro on the diagnostics page. had a hard drive crash so decided  with a solid state 64 gig drive. with ease i installed xp with sp3, mach , my license file and that little nugget of gold, the backup xml .  the pulse frequency is  bouncing up and down from 1 to 68 back to 1 to 100 sometimes to 24350. tried the special driver, no change. reinstalled xp  no change. drivers are all updated. have decrapped xp as to the optimising instructions and using standard pc.  the motors wont turn.
tried different versions of mach. tried .58, .22 still nothing. driver test shows excellent with mostly a flat line .i've been a user of mach since 2007 so thought i knew my way around.  its driving me nucking futs! before i get out the BFH, is there something i am missing?