Messages

51

General Mach Discussion / Re: Soft Limit Warning

« on: September 17, 2009, 03:25:42 PM »

Bill, I did report this problem in the new bug reporting link on this forum, so hopefully Brian will eventually work through all the bugs there and put this one to rest.

It would probably help if you reported this bug there also, here's the link:

http://www.machsupport.com/bugs.php

Paul T.

52

General Mach Discussion / Re: Kernal Speed and Chatter

« on: September 14, 2009, 12:29:10 PM »

Sail, give us more information on the material you are cutting, the axial and radial depth of cuts, the type of cutting tool and tool holder you are using, how far the cutting tool is extended from the holder, what spindle RPM you are using and what type of machine you have. This will make it easier to figure out what is causing the chatter.

Paul T.

53

General Mach Discussion / Re: Button style tool holder???

« on: September 13, 2009, 03:04:22 PM »

A

I got a number of set up plates with farmer welds all over them.

CB

You're cracking me up, you want everybody to be PC when talking about artists but then you take a dump on hayseeds.

Paul T.

54

General Mach Discussion / Re: Question about how LPT1 is running

« on: August 06, 2009, 05:37:33 PM »

There are two things Mach doing that make it work better than your approach.

The Mach program uses a special driver to allow accurate step motor control, its more tuned for this kind of work than the general purpose Inpout32.dll

I believe Mach buffers step commands at the driver level, meaning that when the Mach application gets blocked for a while by Windows, the driver has a buffer full of commands to work though until the Mach application becomes alive again and fills the buffer back up. This works because the drivers are guaranteed to be serviced at a higher rate than user applications.

Its going to be hard to get accurate step motor control under Windows unless you somehow implement a similar approach. Its doable, but it might be easier for you to use one of the DOS or Linux based real time kernels to implement your program.

If there was a software specification and library available for using the Mach LPT driver it would make the job easier, but I don't think that info is available.

Good luck-

Paul T.

55

General Mach Discussion / Re: Soft Limit Warning

« on: June 11, 2009, 11:41:29 AM »

I also regularly see soft limit problems with the .027 Mach release. You'll get a warning on first run that I know isn't correct as the code has been run before in the same configuration, and if you ok through the warning the program will run without problems. On next run the warning doesn't occur, its always on the first run for me.

Paul T.

56

General Mach Discussion / Re: 3.042.026 Fixtures broken

« on: April 17, 2009, 04:38:09 PM »

If the offset field doesn't show a leading + sign in the number display, ie it shows 1.434 instead of +1.434 then the problem is the missing symbol in the format string for that display. On my machine an install of .026 installs a screen that function properly, the problem came up for me when I used .026 with an earlier release screen.

Try re-loading the standard screen, from Mach do:

View->Load Screens and select 1024.set . This should load the 026 standard screen, and should function ok. If it doesn't somehow your installation may not have installed that screen for some reason.

Paul T.

57

General Mach Discussion / Re: 3.042.026 Fixtures broken

« on: April 16, 2009, 10:24:15 AM »

Simpson, which profile did you select during the install?

Did you load any add-on screen sets, and if so, which one?

Paul T.

58

General Mach Discussion / Re: 3.042.026 Fixtures broken

« on: April 15, 2009, 02:24:18 PM »

Simpson, I hit this issue myself when upgrading to 0.026. In my case it turned out that the screen set I was using, which is one I customized, not the one supplied in 0.026, didn't  have the format strings set correctly for the offset entry/display windows. After the % char in the format string there should be a + symbol, it wasn't there in my screen set. Putting it back in (using screen4.exe) fixed it for me.

I guess this missing symbol didn't matter in earlier versions but it looks like it does in 0.026.

Paul T.

59

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 Spindle/VFD plug-in - Interested?

« on: March 31, 2009, 10:14:04 AM »

Boilerbots, could you please post that VFD code so I can see what I'd be getting into if I decide to try to set this up?

Thanks,

Paul T.

60

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 Spindle/VFD plug-in - Interested?

« on: March 29, 2009, 02:04:19 PM »

I'd likely buy a serial VFD control plug-in if it didn't break the bank too badly, currently I'm controlling my VFD via a analog output from my breakout board, but the accuracy is around +/- 5%, which causes me some problems when tapping.

Paul T.