Messages

18861

PoKeys / How I made my pendant.

« on: June 15, 2009, 01:55:08 PM »

Attached is a word document that details my pendant.

Hood

18862

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: Success! Mini Machining Center under Mach3 control - Video link

« on: June 15, 2009, 12:07:32 PM »

Simpson, RayL is a software writer to trade, I think, so  you should feel no embarrassment

Hood

18863

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor movement. Need xml checked.

« on: June 15, 2009, 12:04:41 PM »

Demo is good for always at the moment, things may change in the future,  there at the moment limitations with the demo such as Run From Here, Threading in Turn, Mill limited to 500 lines and Turn 200lines.

What kind of drives/bob do you have?
Hood

18864

General Mach Discussion / Re: New Machine Build - Mach 3 Help Needed!

« on: June 15, 2009, 09:09:24 AM »

The softlimits are in Machine Coords so setting the X and Y min will be at your machine coords zero position, ie exactly where your home switched closed again when you did your homing move. The X and Y Max and Z Min are set to your axis travels (Z being a negative number) so your softlimits are now set from Machine Zero to max travel of your axis
Hood

18865

General Mach Discussion / Re: No motor movement. Need xml checked.

« on: June 15, 2009, 08:57:06 AM »

xml looks ok but then again there is nothing set in it except the motors, this could be that you have nothing else working via Mach such as limits, spindle etc or it could be you have attached the wrong xml.
 What Drives do you use also what if any Breakout board?

Hood

18866

General Mach Discussion / Re: New Machine Build - Mach 3 Help Needed!

« on: June 15, 2009, 08:50:44 AM »

Hi all,

I'm just nearing completion of a bridgeport retrofit using mach 3, natrually I have read the manuals and watched the tutorial videos and I have got as far as cutting a few parts however there remains a few things which i'm unsure about so I'd be really greatful if someone could help me out.

First of all here is my current mach3 XML file: http://www.ukcnc.org/bpt.xml as I'm sure someone will ask for it at some point. I'm running Version R3.042.020

Now onto the questions:

#1 The other day I was using mach to mill some shapes from HDPE sheet. For one reason or another I chose to stop the cut cycle mid way by pressing the stop button. I then wanted to restart the program so I pressed rewind and then pressed goto zero so I could start again from the same place as before. However when I pressed goto zero it did not operate in the way I expected and all three axes moved at the same time (i.e before the z had time to rise above the material) and as a result it snapped my cutter.

First thing is you shouldnt press Stop unless it is an emergency or the code is at a standstill. Reason is that it will stop instantly and you may lose position. The procedure if you want to halt is press FeedHold then once the axis has stopped you can then press Stop.
 Next thing is it sounds like you have not set a safe Z, if you had that set then the Z should  go up first, X and Y will then move then Z will again go down.

#2 What I would like to know is if it is possible to change the operation of mach 3 so when pressing 'go to zero' it zeros the z axis before moving the x and y?

Answered above

To reduce mechanical and electrical loads on my system, the acceleration ramps on my spindle inverter drive are set quite quite high - somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds. I have noticed that this causes problems when running g-code programs because Mach 3 starts cutting before my spindle has reached the set speed. How can I tell mach to delay for longer without individually modifying every g-code file ?

On Ports and Pins Spindle setup you can add a delay there for this purpose.

#3 Is it possible to get Mach to automatically return to it's G54 zero position at the end of a program without manually pressing goto zero?

Normal way would just to have the move in your G-Code but you could write a macro and then have an m code call that, the macro would basically press the GoToZero button. As you would have to write that m code to the end of the G Code then its probably just as easy to actually write the move in G Code

#4 What do driver watchdog errors mean ? I seem to get a lot of these when running my spindle at full speed. Is it likley that noise from the VFD is causing these errors or is this just coincidence?

Watchdogs can trigger for all sorts of reasons and Arts usual advice is disable them on the General Config page.

#5 Every time I load Mach3 I get a message saying "No Shuttle Detected of Type Selected" what does this mean and how can I get rid of it ?

Go to C:\Mach3\PlugIns and delete the shuttle plugin

#6 I have setup softlimits to protect both ends of each axis and on its own this works very well, making it impossible to jog into the limit switches or beyond accidently or otherwise. I thought it would be great to always have this feature enabled so I turned on softlimits and saved as default settings. Of course next time i loaded up mach 3 I get an error about softlimits exceeded  and I have to turn off softlimits so I can 'ref all home'. Also because I don't want my soft limits to be right on my real limits - I figured it would be sensible to allow some space for stuff to slow down etc , after homing I have to jog all my axes slightly off zero before I can turn soft limits back on.

My question is if it is possible to automate this process in some way, so softlimits are always on but are ignored until the axes are referenced upon each load and after referencing moves each axis just past zero so as not to retrigger the soft limit warning ?

You need to set the X and Y Min  and Z Max to zero on the Softlimits page, that way you can home fine with softlimits enabled. Just to make it clearer, the zero position once you have homed is when the axis has reversed and the switch has closed so going to zero in machine coords will not trip your limits. You will however need to set a slow zone so that if moving at full rapids  towards a softlimit Mach has time to decelerate, how big a slow zone you need will depend on your machione and will have to be found by trial and error.

#7 Since calibrating my axes to get a more precise steps per unit value, the DRO's no longer read what they are told. For example if I type in G0 X10, my X DRO displays +9.9996 I realise that this is only a very tiny difference but I do find it irritating that it's not displaying the number I asked it to display. Is there a way to solve this without compromising accuracy of the machine?

It is not a problem in reality as Mach keeps a check of where it is to many more decimal places. The reason however you see that is that because of your resolution (steps per unit) Mach is unable to move exactly to that position or the next step would take it past the commanded position.

#8 How do most people go about transfering G-code files into mach 3? I'm wondering what is the common thing to do here. With my current setup I have a dedicated cnc controler pc which basically just has windows and mach 3 installed and nothing else. I then have a separate pc with all my cad/cam software and everything else. Originally I thought it would be nice and simple and easy to copy files from one to another with USB memory sticks, however experience has now shown me that this is actually really inconvenient espcially if you are prototyping something / experimenting and want to make lots of changes to a file and test out the results.
I'm thinking some sort of LAN/WLAN setup might be the nicest option so then I could save my CAM ouput from one computer directly into the mach3 gcode folder on the other computer. So is this what the rest of you do ? I'm just wondering firstly if the networking protocols are likley to interfere with the running of mach and also how to deal with the thread of viruses/worms. I've read that one should avoid running antivirus or firewall software on their mach pc as it can interfere with the pulsing but then without any of that its kind of exposed to any threats that try to spread accross the network.


I think thats about all for now. Sorry for writing an essay here but I guess that is partly new user syndrome - needing to know an awful lot about everything all at once! I will be very greatful to anyone who can help me out.

Regards,
 Dom

I have my mill, lathe and desktop computer connected via network, I then place the code in a file on the machines computer and open from there. It is best not to load the code over the network so that is why I place it in a folder on the machines computer and load from there.

Hood

18867

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need help with tool turret on lathe

« on: June 15, 2009, 07:54:10 AM »

Afraid I am not good enough at VB to use counters which is probably the easiest way to go, although possibly you could write to a DRO to add one  on each Lock Signal and use that to count which station it is at, you would need to have your VB reset to 1 after 8 has been reached.
 Have you asked Peter how he has done his? even if he does it via his ModIO I would think the VB in his M6 would still work with slight modification.

Hood

18868

General Mach Discussion / Re: Soft limit problem - Mach3 + SmoothStepper

« on: June 14, 2009, 06:10:21 PM »

You seem to have the soft limits set up in a strange way, try setting the X and Y min to zero and see if that helps. Also your Z axis seems funny but maybe that is just the type of machine, what is it and are all of your Z moves positive (in machine coords) as the norm is for all Z moves to be a negative value.
Hood

18869

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need help with tool turret on lathe

« on: June 14, 2009, 05:12:03 PM »

I presume you will want the home to happen just after you have started Mach and are referencing the axis? If so then you would just add the VB to the Ref All button.
 For the index you would add the code to the m6start.m1s macro.
You say it has feedback for each index spot yet only two outputs (inputs to CNC) what form does the signal for each index position take?
My turret has six tools and there are 3 switches that indicate which position it is in so if yours was similar you could probably just adapt my macro to suit.

Hood

18870

SmoothStepper USB / Re: Homing "x" axis not working correctly

« on: June 14, 2009, 02:14:48 PM »

If you have a high value in at the moment try something low.
Dont really know what else to suggest but has to be mach sees the switch active, starts the backoff, sees it close and then it opens again. This seems to be, from your description, happening so fast Mach doesnt even really back off. Cant think what else to suggest other than if its easy enough to do try swapping a limit from another axis onto the knee to see if its a problematic opto.
Hood