Messages

1041

General Mach Discussion / Re: How do I configure Mach3

« on: November 09, 2007, 08:13:10 PM »

I would suggest that you first read over the available documentation (look at the tutorial tab at the top of each page, when it opens click on documentation). Also watch the video tutorials. That will give you a good idea of what you need to configure in Mach and how the program works. I don't think there is any way to damage your steppers by incorrectly configuring Mach.

1042

General Mach Discussion / Re: Time to have new members have restricted posting rights

« on: November 05, 2007, 12:26:25 PM »

Every step you take to prevent the spam bots from creating accounts is accounts will be overcome, eventually. The problem is that every step you take to manually screen new users takes an enormous amount of time for the site's moderators. This only adds to the time they have to spend dealing with the few cranky a**holes who always seem to be out to spread hate and discontent (speaking from my experience as a moderator on a few other forums, not about anything I've seen/experienced here).

As forum members we can help out by reporting posts when we see them (there is a report button on each post). This helps take some of the moderators.

1043

General Mach Discussion / Re: Getting the right software

« on: October 29, 2007, 10:18:45 PM »

Dennis, perhaps you can elaborate a bit more on what you are trying to accomplish, someone can helps steer you in the correct direction. If your just wanting to cut gemometirc shapes to a certain depth then LazyCam will do that. If your wanting to do something with photographs (people, etc) then ArtCAM is hard to beat.

1044

General Mach Discussion / Re: Getting the right software

« on: October 29, 2007, 01:59:51 PM »

First, it is VERY important to understand that there is no 3D information in a photograph. Some systems convert the level of gray of a given pixel to a depth of cut. In general that method works very poorly. ArtCAM has some nice built in tools to help you go from a photograph to a relief (but it runs around $8,000 USD. I think Vetric V-Carve will some some manipulation of photos into a a sort of line art carving with a V-bit, but it is not really a relief (3D).

In short, there is no software than can do this automatically, as a photograph does not provide any 3D data.

1045

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Your opinion of Vista ?

« on: October 15, 2007, 10:06:18 AM »

mhdale,

I think you just need to find a USB-Serial adapter with Vista drivers. A quick search turned up the following (searched for 'usb to serial Vista'):

http://www.usbgear.com/computer_cable_details.cfm?sku=USB2-4COM-M&cats=199&catid=199%2C469
http://www.cooldrives.com/usbtors9miad.html

I'm sure there are loads of others. Drivers are one of the big problems with Vista, not because of Vista, but because many drivers stink, and many companies don't believe in getting with the program and providing updated (and well written) drivers.

I just upgraded to a Vista laptop and can't, for-the-life-of-me ,understand all the hand wringing and belly aching some folks are doing about Vista. The install is easy, don't like UAC, turn it off. My biggest hurdle was finding/downloading/installing the video driver.

1046

Brains Development / Re: Mach with Brains, smart enough for closed loop?

« on: October 10, 2007, 11:57:36 PM »

Writing closed loop code is more complicated than how fast the Brain might or LPT might be. When you are comparing fast signals its not only important to be able to read them fast but you have to read them consistently (meaning the same time delay between each loop, i.e. hard real time). You are always dealing with signals after the fact, that is after the event already occurred. If your LPT (your encoder signals) latches with a different/inconsistent time delay and/or the DRO signals have an inconsistent time of update than the information garnered would not be very accurate. As I understand it Mach runs in a quasi hard real time, using a hardware timer on the mobo. This works great 99.999% of the time, but things can decide to grab large amounts of processor time (like stupid QuickTime services) and then Mach can/will loose steps. EMC works differently, they use a Real Time kernel extension that gives EMC top billing over everything else.

With external stepper/servo controllers (Galil, NCpod, G100) you get the best of both worlds. You have a hardware driver whose only job is to control the motor (the loop is closed in the drivers) and that leaves the whole PC available to Mach to calculate the next moves to be taken, update the display, and monitor the keyboard (etc).

1047

Brains Development / Galil Brains

« on: October 10, 2007, 12:18:34 AM »

From watching the videos it seems that at the current state Brains can deal with the various flavors of Mod Bus and LPT's. What about the Galil hardware? I think using a combination of Brains and macros would be great for the tool changer logic on my Bridgeport VMC retrofit.

1048

General Mach Discussion / Re: Charge Pump Signal Hiccup

« on: September 10, 2007, 02:15:43 PM »

First what does your driver test look like?  There are lots of things that can influence timing, drivers and running services can cause problems, not to mention the the design of the hardware itself can cause problems.  When your 'charge pump' signal is going wonky what do your step signal look like?

The term 'charge pump' comes from a circuit design that uses a free running oscillator to generate a different voltage (higher or negative).  In the case of Mach III the 'charge pump' signal is used as a watchdog signal.  Mach III HAS to be running properly for this signal to be present.  Parallel port pins will be in an unknown state when the PC starts and/or when Mach starts.  When Mach takes control of your LPT you don't it will reset all the proper state, in the mean time you do not want a LPT pin that is latched hi or low to falsely indicate to you machine that it is OK to move.

I'm not discounting that there may be a bug in the charge pump driver, I'm hoping Brian or Art will chime in on that.  But I think you need to do a bit more investigating to rule out problems with you OS/hardware first.

1049

General Mach Discussion / Re: Charge Pump Signal Hiccup

« on: September 10, 2007, 09:54:15 AM »

Laptops can be hideous with Mach III.  All the power saving systems can cause lots of timing issues.  When I first set Mach up for testing I was running on a Dell D610 laptop and it was nasty.  I found a post here, named something like, 'Running Mach on a laptop', that had a link to a piece of software that let you keep the processor running full speed.  That helped a bunch although I still had a hiccup which was tracked down to the bloody QT.exe (or what ever it's called) service the QuickTime installs that seem to have no other purpose than to eat up half your processor every couple of seconds.  I've since built a 'new' ( a few years old) computer, just for the controller, and it is working great.

1050

General Mach Discussion / Re: Charge Pump Frequency

« on: September 10, 2007, 09:43:10 AM »

I'm kind of curious about this issue as well.  It seems the charge pump signal should be just as accurate as the axis step signals.  To actually be of use the charge pump signal should be fairly accurate, say 12.5 +- 0.5 kHz.  (I think that is pretty loose, but still OK).  If Mach can't maintain the accuracy of the charge pump where is the guarantee that the axis signals will accurate?

I have not noticed the change in freq. as the OP.  I built my own CP circuit on my break-out board too so I have spent some time hanging a scope on the signal and purposely tried to give it a narrow band of operation.

To the OP:  Have you been watching your axis step signals at the same time?  Are they also slow when the CP is slow?  Does your driver test appear to be OK?