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Messages - Jeff_Birt

841
That looks good, appears that you got the welding power supply up into spray mode. One nice side effect of welding automation is that is almost impossible to do by hand, like spray transfer on thinning materials. If you add a bit of dwell at the end of the cycle you can reduce the crater/low spot caused when welding and motion stop together.

842
jallitt, do you have an optically isolated BOB? How is your system (earth)grounded?

843
That's true Hood, I was not very clear in my initial response. I should have mentioned looking for the virtual ports in Device manager as a clue.

You can also have issues with the motherboard not supporting using a parallel port as Mach does, even a 'good' add-on PCI will work. (But the driver test will look good!)

That is why I'm a big SmoothStepper cheerleader. (Did that give you a strange mental picture?  :P )

844
Some cards do not have the same HW layout as legacy parallel ports. Their drivers create a virtual parallel port, much like a USB to parallel adapter. These types of cards will not work just like the USB to parallel adapters won't work.

You can choose to not believe it if you wish, but that information is direct from the guy who wrote Mach's parallel port driver. I suspect he would know.  ;)

845
Quote
I searched and searched, installed the drivers from the netmos site, tripple checked my base adresses etc..  

What can I do?  Is there a known working card I can buy? I dont care if it costs over 100$, I need something that works.

If you have to install drivers, like you mentioned above, then the card will not work. Having to install drivers means that the card is emulating a parallel port for printing purposes. There is no direct set of ports for Mach to talk to. It seems that finding a compatible PCI parallel port can can be a hit or miss proposition. I do recall seeing a few posts where folks have mentioned cards that worked for them. It might be worth a search.

I recommend folks skip the hassle and use a SmoothStepper. It does 99% of everything the LPT driver does and does it faster and smoother, and has two full ports built in. I've not sold one yet and had a customer disappointed with it.

846
General Mach Discussion / Re: MACH 3 lockup
« on: June 03, 2009, 09:38:42 AM »
Brian, care to share how you fixed it? That helps other folks out who may experience the same problem at some point in time.

847
General Mach Discussion / Re: mach 3 license
« on: June 02, 2009, 08:56:18 PM »
Quote
Ps I am draging it to the mach3mill icon on my desktop 



What? That is not how you move a file! You need to open the Mach installation folder which is usually c:\mach and drag the license file to that folder...

848
SmoothStepper USB / Re: Homing "x" axis not working correctly
« on: June 01, 2009, 09:55:08 AM »
If you can measure the output signal with a scope I would do that. You need to know what the SS is seeing. Have you tried swapping  two of your sensors to see if the problem moves with them?

849
The switches on the Dyan 2400 are nice switches but they most certainly do have hysteresis. The backlash measurement on the stock controller was a ballpark figure that gave you an idea if an axis or switch was sticky.

Backlash compensation on a mill, except for certain situations, is not very helpful. The cutting force will push the table around taking up any backlash so the compensation is not accurate. If you are only engraving or cutting circles you may see some improvement.

To answer your original question, Mach won't measure the backlash like the stock controller did. You might look into writing your own homing routine with some macros and brains.

850
SmoothStepper USB / SmoothStepper Accesories
« on: May 31, 2009, 10:44:36 PM »
I'm not sure if this is the proper section for this, but it is stuff related to the SS.

Hi guys,

I found some nice low-profile DB25 Mal-to-Mail gender changers. These let you plug the 'LPH26 to DB25' cable directly into a BOB or G540 that has a parallel port style connector. This is very handy as it lets you get by without needing a parallel port cable.

I also found a few other goodies. Since it is always good to keep USB cables as short as possible I have some 3' long cables available now. Another neat addition is a USB-B extension pigtail that is a panel mount. This lets you have a panel mount USB connection on the outside of your case that plugs into the SS on the inside of your case.

You can find it all here: http://soigeneris.com/Warp9.aspx

Thanks,