Messages

411

General Mach Discussion / Re: Accuracy of Homing Devices? Pro's and Con's of Different Sensors

« on: April 30, 2011, 11:25:00 PM »

No matter what type of sensor or switch you use it will not be super accurate all by itself. For really accurate homing it is best to use a combination of a home sensor/switch and an index pulse on the axis motor itself. The home sensor/switch and the index pulse are seen at the same time the controller considers this 'home'. Since the index pulse is based on the angle of the axis motor itself it is very accurate.

Having said all of that you have to stop and ask yourself if having a very accurate homing sensor is even needed for your method of operation. A home sensor only sets the zero for the machine coordinates, it lets the machine get a bearing on where each axis is physically when you start up. For most operations you bolt a part/fixture to the mill table and then you zero the machine to some feature of the part/fixture (local coordinates), you can even have multiple fixtures and multiple local coordinate systems set up. There will be a relationship between the mechanical and these local coordinate systems (an offset), but since you will likely always zero to the part or fixture each time the accuracy of the home sensor is not important.

412

General Mach Discussion / Re: Hood.....where is he?

« on: April 28, 2011, 11:04:40 AM »

Hood, glad you got to spend a few days at home, that is always much better. Good luck with the surgery, it is a much less invasive thing these days.

413

General Mach Discussion / Re: Parallel Port woes - need advice

« on: April 13, 2011, 08:20:18 AM »

(Although there weren't any port address settings in the driver, I selected LPT1, LPT2, and LPT3.)

Generally speaking, if the parallel port card requires a driver it will not work with Mach. Try going into Device Manger and finding the parallel port address and using that in Mach.

If you can't make the parallel port work on your new PC you might want to consider using an external motion control board like the SmoothStepper, DSPMC, etc. Here is a link to the SmoothStepper page on my website:

http://www.soigeneris.com/SmoothStepper-details.aspx

.

414

General Mach Discussion / Re: Gecko 540

« on: April 12, 2011, 10:19:10 AM »

As long as you have some air flow around the G540 you should not need a heaksink with those motors. I use this same type of motor regularly and have done extensive tests w.r.t. the G540 temperature with them.

I went into Mach3 and redid the steps and checked backlash, it was off so I redid the settings but they won't hold into memory for some reason it looks like

I think there may be at least two separate issues here. You may be having problems due to using backlash compensation. I have seen this recently with a customer. Since the G540 is a 10x microstepping drive if you have a high pitch lead screw (like a Taig or Shelrine) you wind up with a steps/unit of 40,000 or so. If your backlash is considerable the parallel port driver cannot properly insert the correct number of steps to account for backlash in the small amount of time it has to do so. The result is that the parallel port driver over accelerates the motors and you loose position.

Losing position in general is a sing that your asking too much of the stepper motors. This could be from taking too aggressive of a cut or having your acceleration and/or max velocity set too high.

If Mach is not saving changes you make the first step is to shut it down and start it up again. If it still will not save then you need to find your XML profile and change its properties so that 'everyone' has read/write permissions.

415

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 Rebooting on Startup again - Is Smooth Stepper the solution?

« on: April 09, 2011, 11:19:43 AM »

From your description it is very hard to tell if you have a PC problem or Mach problem. If it is related to Mach I would suspect it would be something with the parallel port driver. One test would be to remove the parallel port driver and see if your PC still acts up. (Of course you can't run your machine with the driver missing.) If your PC does not act up with the driver removed you could try to use the special driver (run specialdriver.bat in mach directory to install it.)

As everyone knows I'm a big SmoothStepper fan and my inclination would be to ditch the parallel port.

416

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 08, 2011, 12:17:23 PM »

You've been accused of "pushing" the Smoothstepper in the past, probably due to statements like this.

Why is it that you can't disagree with me without hurling accusations? Why is it that you are afford the opportunity to express your own opinion but not me? I'm offering up my opinion, expertise and experience for all, free of charge. If I like a particular product I am most likely gong to tell other people about it, if I think something is a POS I will likely mention that too. (It is also interesting to note that I did not mention any particular product, you did.)

I do run a business and mention some of the items I sell. I sell products that I like, that I have found to work well, have found to be useful and would use in my own shop. I DO NOT just push the cheapest imported crap I can get my hands on. I also talk about a lot of products I don't sell and I recommend a lot of them if they solve a problem someone is facing. In fact you would likely be surprised that I regularly send links in emails to other 'competitive' sites if they offer a product that better suits someones needs. I also work with my 'competitors' to bundle shipments of our respective products for international customers so they can save money on shipping charges. So am I 'pushing' my competitors products when I suggest them to people.

I think if you actually got to know me you would find I'm the least pushy person on the planet.

I think it's safe to assume that the majority of Mach3 users use the parallel port. And these people don't have to spend days to get it working. You've been accused of "pushing" the Smoothstepper in the past, probably due to statements like this.

Of course most people use the parallel port as it has been out the longest. There also used to be no other affordable choice. Now there are lots of choice in all different price/performance ranges for external motion control products. If these products did not offer superior performance they would not exist, i.e. there would be no need for them.

I do a lot of technical support, at least half of it is supporting folks who have never spent even $1 with me. I can say with a strong conviction that getting a parallel port system to work can be very difficult for some folks. Getting a PC (old or new) that works well from the parallel port is like pot-luck, you never know what you are going to wind up with. That is why many companies go through a tremendous effort to test a variety of motherboards and components to find an optimal solution. If you are good with computers you can get a wider variety of PCs to work but most folks do not have that skill set and the results are quite mixed (and a lot of people just get frustrated and quit).

None of the external motion control solutions that work with Mach are perfect either but they work the same no matter what PC they are on. From a support point of view it is much better for the end user and the person providing support as the potential problem set is greatly reduced. I have a few parallel port machines here and they work well so I won't fuss with them at this time. I've have also spent hours trying to get various PCs to work from the parallel port that just did not perform very good at all.

I'm not pushing any particular product as much as pointing out that the parallel port is not the panacea of motion control I/O choices. There are many factors involved besides the initial purchase price.

417

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 08, 2011, 10:25:35 AM »

Something like a Beagleboard or a future version of Arduino should easily have enough horsepower for 4-6 axis CNC. Networking support would be pretty great for controlling and monitoring from a laptop and would easily let people switching controller PCs with a software install, not even requiring drivers. I'd bet you could even run a CNC rig off of a modern smartphone now that they're pushing 1Ghz with dual core processors.

The problem is just having a fast processor is not enough. You have to have the hardware resources available that can do real time motion control. If you look at the motion control baords available today they all use FPGAs to create 'programmable' dedicated hardware for the task. Small microcontrollers can do a limited amount of such control but the hardware involved not fast enough to match what can be done for the same price in an FPGA.

Haivng used a lot of netowrk connected I/O devices I am a bit undecided on their fit for the general public. Configuration is much more difficult and there are an unlimited number of network issues that can cause problems. I've had such devices get into strange states where you cannot connect to them properly and several hours can be spent trying to get an alternitive connection method to work to 'reset' the device.

I can also picture some guy trying to run his CNC machine through his $50 home router rather than have a direct/dedicated connection to the machine and not understand why it won't work properly and be miffed that he has to go out and spend $20 to buy another NIC to make it work properly (and still give him access to his network for file sharing.)

418

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 08, 2011, 09:35:17 AM »

And the cost of CNC will go up, as you'll be forced to use an external motion controller.

Why assume it will 'go up'? I can use a cheap PC/motherboard and a $150 motion control card and have a very nice system. No fussing with the parallel port at all. It is a lot simpler, easier and less expensive than spending days trying to find a mother board whose parallel port will work for a CNC controller or to find PCI card parallel port that will work.. If my cheap PC fails I can move everything to a new PC with no fuss. In my mind the total installed and operating costs drop with an external motion control board.

419

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can't Get Mach 3 To Work...Running Via USB.

« on: March 30, 2011, 10:26:00 AM »

If you look in the fileset there is a folder called 'Profiles' It has a Mach profile in there already set up for the STDR-4C and the Taig. All you have to do is drop it in the Mach install folder. Look on page 5 of the User's manual for a bit more information. Always feel free to give me a call or drop me an email as well. I try to make things as easy to set up as possible and I'm always around for tech support.

While I'm sure I can improve on the users manual, when you are first getting started out there seems to be about 5,000 pages of stuff you need to read to figure everything out. I just picked up some 'screen casting' software so I can make some set up videos showing the process step by step right as it appears on the PC screen. I think this will help make things easier and seeing something is often a lot nicer than reading about something.

420

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: March 17, 2011, 04:40:17 PM »

If you use the external controller, you can run Mach3 on a laptop since the power saving interrupts are not there on the external controller.

Generally speaking you are correct. Windows still has power savings features that should be disabled before trying to use Mach. Many times things like screen savers, processor speed changes, USB port power down, etc can/will cause problems even with an external motion controller. You can set up a Power Profile to shut off the power savings stuff in Windows that you use when you are using Mach. You may also have to kill some of it in your computers BIOS as well.