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Have you tried going into the Spindle Setup tab in Ports & Pins and checking the "Use Spindle Motor Output" box in the Motor Control panel?

What type of machine do you have and what type of motor is on the spindle drive? Are you supposed to be able to control the motor speed from Mach 3? If so you may also need to set up the PWM parameters. Do you have a copy of the Mach 3 manual?? If not then download one from the Newfangled Solutions website.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: New Download

« on: April 16, 2022, 12:54:01 PM »

Well, I use the UC100 from CNCDrive. This uses a USB connection but it works fine for me on both a lathe and a mill on WIN10. You can download the required Mach3 plugin from their website http://cncdrive.com/ . There are various clones of this device from China - make sure you get a genuine one and the genuine plugin. You can also get controllers which use an Ethernet interface and many here recommend these over USB but I think USB works fine if you don't need a lot of I/O and don't have a lot of electrical noise around your workshop, and you aren't going to be running the axes very fast The UC100 is limited to a maximum step pulse rate of 100 kHz.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: New Download

« on: April 16, 2022, 05:13:14 AM »

There is only one parallel port legacy plugin, the one that's bundled into Mach3 when you download it. Your laptop doesn't have a parallel port and Mach 3 parallel port wont work with Win11 or 64 bit anyway. What PC and OS is coming? Win 10 certanly supports M3 fine but with a USB or Ethernet motion controller so I guess Win11 will too.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: emergency mode active wont reset

« on: April 15, 2022, 04:40:59 PM »

You're getting there!

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General Mach Discussion / Re: emergency mode active wont reset

« on: April 15, 2022, 01:32:49 PM »

"They sent me the mach 3 file via email.
I installed it and did the ports and pins according to the manual they also sent."
- did they also provide a license?

"The laptop is not connected to the machine. It uses a usb cable.
I checked the pins and ports and changed them to all suggestions online."
- if you already set them according to the manual why did you change them, and where did these suggestions come from?

U suspect that your problem may be that having set up ports and pins, it is thinking that EStop should be connected to something but it isn't and this is overriding the on-screen button. Usually you should have a physical Estop button on the machine. So if you connect to the machine it may work; or you can look for the Estop line in Ports&Pins/Input Signals and change the green tick in the enabled column to a cross.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 / Win 10 / touch screen

« on: April 14, 2022, 02:19:45 AM »

Thanks Craig - as I read your answer on my laptop I realised that of course I can run M3 in simulation mode on this machine! So I opened it and indeed the on-screen buttons work just as they should (at least the small number I tried). So it should work if I had a touch-screen monitor in the shop too. I wouldn't mind editing the buttons, I've done that for other purposes anyway.

What I find tedious is using the trackpad with my finger to move a cursor on a screen to a button then tapping the trackpad or left mouse button to "push" the onscreen button. Would a trackball be better? - I'm not sure. Ideal would be a physical control panel with real buttons!