Messages

11

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor motion, running out of troubleshooting

« on: May 31, 2009, 11:44:32 PM »

Well I am going to guess the problem is with the parallel port.  I have no real voltage at the adapter end of the PP (the female plug).  I do measure some voltage, but only about .05v, not 5v.  And before anyone asks, I compared it to my 5v adapter so its not that I am reading the muti-meter wrong.  Am I correct that I should be reading 5V at at least some if not all of these pins?

Having gotten this far on my build, I did not expect to be stopped by a lack of a functioning parallel port.  Has anyone had any experience troubleshooting these PCMCIA cards?

12

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor motion, running out of troubleshooting

« on: May 30, 2009, 04:32:46 PM »

I have tried both addresses with no luck.  I could have sworn that the first time I installed the driver it assigned 0378-037F, but now I have this different resource.  It shouldn't matter, unless there is some acceptable range for Mach and it doesn't know how to do this range.

Also, how would I "lock" the settings?  Is there any way to manually assign the resource?

Unfortunately, I don't have a printer old enough to still have a parallel port.  My printers are USB or wireless.  Using parallel ports for this is getting harder and harder!

13

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor motion, running out of troubleshooting

« on: May 30, 2009, 02:52:15 PM »

I have a PCMCIA to Parallel adapter card that gives me the port.  I too suspect this part.  Originally it seemed to use the normal resources, but I had to re-install the driver because it would hang the system when I re-booted.  Now it lists the resources used in two ranges, even though they are contiguous.  FEE0 - FEE7 and FEE8 to FEEF.  That is suspicious to me.

I would love to override the ranges to see if that fixes the problem, but I don't know how.

As for testing pin 3 (a dir pin for the X axis), I don't get 5v ever.  From the cable I get slight fluctuation around 1.8V, through the C-10 BOB I get a more constant 1.8V.  That doesn't seem to match what you were expecting either.

Finally, I detect no change in the voltage when I try to jog the X axis (or any other for that matter).

Sugestions?
Thanks!

14

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor motion, running out of troubleshooting

« on: May 29, 2009, 08:36:05 PM »

I wish it had been as simple as that.  Unfortunately, I see no flashing and the system seems to think every thing is a go.

Here is my .xml file.  I hope it tells you something.

15

General Mach Discussion / No motor motion, running out of troubleshooting

« on: May 29, 2009, 07:01:03 PM »

I'm a noob, so I hope the solution will prove to be simple ...

I have done all the trouble shooting I can think of and still have no motion.  The motors power up, I can't turn them by hand, but nothing happens when I try to move the motors in the tuning mode or with the on screen jogging.

My set up:

XP SP3 Laptop with a MosChip based card
Mach 3 2.0.047
CNC4PC BOB
Gecko 251
36V powersupply
Keling 285oz/in bipolar motors

Mach 3 Settings

Going to the Hardware Manager, The LPT(3) resources gives me two sets of values:
FEE8-FEEF
FEE0-FEE7

I have used both FEE8 and FEE0 in the Mach settings, but no love.  Otherwise the port settings screen has only Port 1 enable checked, nothing else is checked, and I have left the speed at the default 25K.

Motor Out

X, Y, Z are enabled using pins 2/3, 4/5, and 6/7 Port 1.  Active low settings are turned off.

Tuning

On my X and Y axis, they are set to drive a 0.752" diameter pulley reduced 3:1. The 251 cards are 10X micro stepping cards.  The math is a little complicated, but I end up with 2539.7 steps per inch.  So far I have used that value as well as just using the default 2000 steps per inch.

On my Z axis I have 1/4-20 thread screw.  2000 microsteps per revolution x 20 revolutions per inch gives me 40,000 steps per inch.

I get NO MOTION AT ALL.  I don't know what else to check.  The diagnostic page looks normal, EXCEPT that I have a RED at Enable 1.  I don't know what "Enable 1" is, and I notice that in the set up videos Art's screen shows no red for any of the outputs.

I don't know what else to test. 

Any help is appreciated.