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Messages - stirling

1341
General Mach Discussion / Re: Pierce delay for plasma
« on: February 18, 2011, 05:04:44 AM »
which one Matt?

1342
General Mach Discussion / Re: Pierce delay for plasma
« on: February 18, 2011, 04:46:24 AM »
Unfortunately this doesn't improve the situation. No offence intended but it potentially makes it worse.

Just as one example, compare the resultant pierce delay if arcok activates just before the sleep, with what it would be if arcok activates just a few microseconds later after the sleep begins.

Ian

EDIT: I've just thought of another issue about this whole problem but I'll check it out first.

1343
General Mach Discussion / Re: Steppers out of sync and skipped steps?
« on: February 17, 2011, 12:11:24 PM »
Dan

What would the belt do to drop steps? Too tight/too lose? I didn't do the belts up extremely tight, but they aren't loose either.

As I've said, it is likely to exacerbate the possible problems of driving two motors from one driver. These problems include but are not limited to: microstep mismatch (as Tweakie has said), resonance problems - two motors can really screw with a driver's anti-resonance circuitry - and messing with the drive's current limiting circuitry. Part of the reason for these problems is that when two motors are mechanically coupled as yours are, then each motor is alternately driving/being driven whilst the other is being driven/driving. A driven motor is a generator: result: chaos.

However, even if the two motors had their own driver, mechanically coupling two motors together is likely to produce a combined torque value that is actually less than a single motor would produce. This is because they will more than likely be continually fighting each other mechanically.

Ian

1344
General Mach Discussion / Re: Steppers out of sync and skipped steps?
« on: February 17, 2011, 08:21:50 AM »
Another idea for the mix.

Basically, I have 2 belts to move the X axis, with 2 steppers on each belt (4 steppers in total)

2 of these steppers are wired onto channel A on my controller board, and slaved.
and presumably the other two are wired onto channel X on the controller board?

In both cases, driving two steppers from one channel CAN work but it doesn't allways turn out that way. IMHO, the likelyhood of this working is further exacerbated by the way you have them physically coupled, i.e. via a belt.

Ian

1345
General Mach Discussion / Re: any recommendations for pendant / mpg?
« on: February 17, 2011, 03:56:05 AM »
I guess nobody uses a pendant with plasma then.

Thanks

Ian

1346
General Mach Discussion / Re: Pierce delay for plasma
« on: February 17, 2011, 03:53:54 AM »
Matt - don't know if you're still interested in this but I asked Brian if he thought it should be corrected and it seems he doesn't... so the test for ArcOK in the m3 macro appears to be the only way to do this.

Ian

1347
General Mach Discussion / Re: any recommendations for pendant / mpg?
« on: February 16, 2011, 03:55:18 AM »
Hi Tweaks - well I guess I'm asking for recommendations for a pendant / mpg that will stand up to a dirty environment and heavy handed use in an industrial environment... ;)

Ian

1348
General Mach Discussion / any recommendations for pendant / mpg?
« on: February 15, 2011, 11:18:44 AM »
plasma and ugly blokes who aren't paying for it - so harsh environment. i.e. shuttlepro looks cute enough but can't see it lasting to teatime - maybe I'm wrong.

Home, jog, start, stop should do it.

Ta

Ian


1349
General Mach Discussion / Re: Problems with axis accuracy - MachTurn
« on: February 14, 2011, 05:34:30 AM »
I can see that microstepping is not working exactly as one might naively expect and I'm seeing an effective "average" single step size of around a micron which is double what it "ought" to be.
Lost me there John. Microstep errors are non-accumulative so in your case with a microstepping factor of 8, the average should be an 1/8th of a full step.

Ian

1350
VB and the development of wizards / Re: Been searching for an answer
« on: February 14, 2011, 05:26:54 AM »
Hi Rodney - welcome to the forum.

SendKeys works just fine - but remember that sendKeys targets the application that has focus. If you're running sendKeys from the VB editor in Mach or from a button, then Mach has the focus... so it's sending keystrokes to itself.

Enter this into the VB editor in Mach.

sleep 10000
sendKeys("abc")

before you run it, open a copy of notepad. Then run the script - you then have 10 seconds to give notepad focus. Personally I dislike SendKeys, it can have nasty effects if you focus the wrong app.

As far as accessing a DLL from VB script - just do it as you would from any implementation of VB - use createObject.

Ian