Hello Guest it is March 29, 2024, 06:11:06 AM

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - sn96

Pages: « 1 2 3 4 5 6 »
31
General Mach Discussion / Why is the tool length important to mach3?
« on: March 25, 2011, 08:55:29 AM »
Why is the tool length important to mach3? When you jog down to the work piece and Zero the Z axis it knows were the tip of the tool is. The only thing I can think of is that when you are using multiple tools, you don't have to re-zero after each change. Am I right?

32
General Mach Discussion / Re: Am I loosing steps?
« on: March 14, 2011, 11:11:11 AM »
I don't think you need to use your best (or favourite) PC - A second user one would perhaps do.

Having said all this I have an old Dell Inspiron which works just great, but perhaps this is the exception.  ;D

Tweakie.

Well my main plan was to use the desktop when I got a new PC but was tired of unhooking it from inside the house, hooking it up in the garage only to unhook - re-hook when I was done using it. The laptop I had sitting in the closet unused and I figure it was worth formatting and trying XP on it so that I can use it while I wait for the time to get a new PC.

What I will end up doing is getting a new laptop, take the old desktop for out in the garage, and give the IBM Thinkpad to my daughter so that she can play her games on it. In the mean time, I will use the laptop for learning the ropes and experimenting with.

33
General Mach Discussion / Re: Am I loosing steps?
« on: March 14, 2011, 08:52:22 AM »
That odd tick from a stepper is the symptom of lost (or additional) steps. On my machine one lost step would equal 0.003mm and you would be hard pushed to notice a few of those as an inaccuracy.
It is not recommended to use laptops with Mach unless a separate motion controller (such as Smooth Stepper) is used. There are many reasons why laptops cause problems and you could be lucky and locate the problem early on or you could be chasing this forever.
I would suggest you either get a SS or use a machine dedicated PC then use your IBM for internet / programming etc.

Tweakie.


Thanks Tweakie. Before I decided to blow the dust off the laptop to use for cnc, I did use my primary desktop PC  which uses an AMD Athlon 64 2.4ghz 2gigs memory with a 256mb video card and that computer worked flawlessly, in fact, I was able to jog faster with that machine without the motors going ZZzzzzzzzzzz! due to a stall. I will take your word and use the Desktop as my production PC.

Thanks for the help.

34
General Mach Discussion / Am I loosing steps?
« on: March 13, 2011, 10:26:47 PM »
Hey guys,

I have a sherline 5400 inch mill with sherline stepper motors and driver. The pc I am using is an IBM ThinkPad T43 with 2ghz processor and 512mb ram running Windows XP with no extras. I did a complete format of the hard drive and installed a watered down version of XP. I did install the following drivers: Audio, Touch pad, wi-fi, and Oprera web browser so that I can check the forums, check documentation or anything else I may need. I went into the bios and turned off power management and processor throttling which fixed my jogging problem. After starting mach3 the motors would jog fast then slow down before editing the bios.

I do have a question with the stepper motors: x,y and z seem to thump once or twice when jogged the full lenght of travel but I don't notice any difference in accuracy. how much is one lossed step equal to in distance? when I grip the motors when jogging, you can feel as well as hear a bump/thump. what is it? is that what happens when a step is lost?

I am still learning. Thanks in advance.

35
From a quick search "DXF Import"


http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,16616.0.html
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,1642.0.html

MUCH more there if you are interested.
 :)
Russ

Thanks, perhaps a quick search would have been the thing to do first.

36
Hello guys,

I have the lockdown version of Mach3 and I don't see anywhere where you can import DXF files like the manual describes. Was this feature removed? if so, why?

37
General Mach Discussion / Re: Steppers and mach out of sync
« on: March 07, 2011, 08:30:54 PM »
I had some strange issues with my setup, when I would jog, the motors would move in one direction 27 in a min. but when jogged in the reverse direction they would only move 1 inch a min. and the problem would change directions. Out of curiosity, I loaded up the mach3 mill profile and plugged in my settings and wala! all my issues were gone. I went back to my custom profile and did a restore from the menu bar OPERATOR>Restore Settings... and rolled back one setup config and it got rid of my problem. Somehow the custom profile got corrupted.

I'm not saying this is your problem but you might want to try setting up a different profile using your settings and see if the problem carries over to the new profile. Just something to try.

38
Ok, I found the information. I went to sherlines website and found this:

Motor Connectors:

∙ 5-pin DIN male
∙ Five to 30 volts (better performance at higher voltage)
∙ 2 amp unipolar configuration
∙ 800 steps per revolution (microstepping), equates to 16,000 steps/inch with .050" pitch leadscrew

so it is 16000 is what I need. I do have the sherline half step checked also.

39
If Mike uses the axis calibration feature he need not even calculate them, but first, he needs to provide controller info so Mach is set up correctly.
RICH
 

The cnc upgrade kit didn't come with any info on the driver box, only safety info. The manual that came with my mill has a section on the driver box and the only thing it says is the "steps per pulse should be 15us"

40
In the motor tuning, it only shows max 5us so in my case it sould be 20000. Right? I don't see where you got 10us?

Pages: « 1 2 3 4 5 6 »