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General Mach Discussion / noob looking for guidance
« on: April 09, 2009, 02:45:28 AM »
Have had my taig DSLS running Mach 3 for a couple weeks now and it usually runs perfectly fine through anything gcode I throw at it. But sometimes it stops with a 'limit switch' error though it is far from any limits, this might happen 30 seconds into a run or 2 hours into a run. I believe this is the clasic missed steps error being caught because the encoder/move got out of sync but feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding. With maybe 40-45 hours on the clock I have had just 5 of these stops.
Being new I looked around but am still a little confused on the correct interpretation of the driver test and motor tuning options. I am pretty zelous about keeping the ways cleaned and lightly oiled and it does not seem to be any binding or undue looseness (.0015 x, .0010y backlash). The stall can happen either in x or y so I lean away from a mechanical issue. as a test on the last stop I just restarted the spindle and hit cycle start and it picked up and ran through the rest of the gcode (albiet out of alignment) I also reran the gcode on a new block of material and it ran through to the end without a problem. I have run the driver test and it reports excellent at all speeds 25k up to 100k. I went through motor tuning and had it set at 80 ipm 5 accel which worked fine but backed it down to 60 ipm 2 accel after the second stall and it still stalls. This is on a Compaq desktop, athlon 3500+, Xp home, 1.5GB RAM, PCI video. I am using the built in parallel port, and the BIOS on the compaqs are not really full featured but if there are specific setting I should look for I will dig through there and see what options are available.
Any ideas where to focus my attention to eliminate these random stops would be appreciated, it's getting annoying to hit a stall after 2 hours in a 3 hour run, I suppose once I get better at repeatible zeroing the axis it might not be as bad, right now I usually just chuck the stalled jobs in the recycle bin because getting back withing .005 seems to be the best I can do and doing PCB etching that does not cut it.
Thanks for any insight you more experienced folks can pass down.
Mark
Being new I looked around but am still a little confused on the correct interpretation of the driver test and motor tuning options. I am pretty zelous about keeping the ways cleaned and lightly oiled and it does not seem to be any binding or undue looseness (.0015 x, .0010y backlash). The stall can happen either in x or y so I lean away from a mechanical issue. as a test on the last stop I just restarted the spindle and hit cycle start and it picked up and ran through the rest of the gcode (albiet out of alignment) I also reran the gcode on a new block of material and it ran through to the end without a problem. I have run the driver test and it reports excellent at all speeds 25k up to 100k. I went through motor tuning and had it set at 80 ipm 5 accel which worked fine but backed it down to 60 ipm 2 accel after the second stall and it still stalls. This is on a Compaq desktop, athlon 3500+, Xp home, 1.5GB RAM, PCI video. I am using the built in parallel port, and the BIOS on the compaqs are not really full featured but if there are specific setting I should look for I will dig through there and see what options are available.
Any ideas where to focus my attention to eliminate these random stops would be appreciated, it's getting annoying to hit a stall after 2 hours in a 3 hour run, I suppose once I get better at repeatible zeroing the axis it might not be as bad, right now I usually just chuck the stalled jobs in the recycle bin because getting back withing .005 seems to be the best I can do and doing PCB etching that does not cut it.
Thanks for any insight you more experienced folks can pass down.
Mark