Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Z Axis Stops Working / Fails To Move

« on: August 13, 2012, 09:18:45 AM »

Thanks Overloaded. Checked through all the wiring and connections and all looks good so don't think its the root cause of the issue I'm seeing here. I ran the program again over the weekend and the same thing happened (at a different point in the program) with the G0 Z3.0 return to safe Z command. It's a large 2.5D file with 450,000 lines so I can't really sit there and watch it continuously but I did catch what I think was the motor stalling when moving the Z and hence had to reset the Z height. By the time this had happend I was already through 20,000 lines of code so its definitly not a regular occurance and struggle to understand how it could be a motor tuning issue.

Any ideas?  

2

General Mach Discussion / Z Axis Stops Working / Fails To Move

« on: August 06, 2012, 07:00:16 AM »

Hi All,

I'm new to CNC'ing and Mach3 but over the last couple of months have slowly been working through the issues with my Taig2000 micro mill setup with a Microproto controller which I recently purchased second hand.

After many, many hours of setting up and debugging the setup I thought I had it sussed but I now have one final issue to resolve.

I was machining a part over the weekend and all was looking good until disaster happened. At end of a profile run the Z axis didn't physically move back its safe height even though the DRO on Mach3 showed that it did. The motor itself didn't make any noise so it wasn't stalled as I had when configuring the machine initially (I know that noise well), it just didn't move. The consequence of this was a nice machined groove across the surface of my part and then the Z axis tried to plunge the bit back through the work piece due to it being out of position relative to the DRO.

I think I may have caught a situation a little like this before where when jogging around the Z axis fails to respond. If I then move either the X or Y axis and go back to the Z axis it then moves normally (I have never looked to see if the DRO is still moving in this situation). I am using the Joypad plugin with a Logitec Joypad to jog and I had wondered if this could cause have caused this issue but not sure if would have any affect when running a program.

I have Mach3 R3.043.022 installed and I'm now running on a 3GHz P4 dedicated PC with a PCI parallel card and all the suggested windows XP optimizations in place after a lot of trial and error to begin with.


Anyone have any suggestions? 


 

3

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motor Pin Numbers Changing Randomly....HELP PLEASE

« on: June 11, 2012, 06:43:50 PM »

Well I removed both versions of Mach 3 and re-installed the latest one and all seems to work fine!

Thought I'd better close the thread out!

Cheers for the help.

4

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motor Pin Numbers Changing Randomly....HELP PLEASE

« on: June 05, 2012, 05:50:23 PM »

I'm using an xp laptop which I've just rebuilt so apart from Mach 3 the only other thing it's running is FreeMill (which isn't a lot of use as you can't seem to set max cutting step depth). I also have the joypad plugin installed and running.

I do have 2 versions of Mach 3 installed as the mill came with a copy of an older version but only running with the latest one I just downloaded. Could this cause an issue? Hummhhh.

Not with the computure at the moment but will post the XML as soon as I get a chance tomorrow.

Thanks for the quick response guys!

5

General Mach Discussion / Motor Pin Numbers Changing Randomly....HELP PLEASE

« on: June 05, 2012, 03:58:55 PM »

Hi, I've just bought a second hand taig micro mill 2000 with a microproto stepper controller and I'm currently trying to set up Mach3 to run it. I downloaded the XML available from this site specifically for my setup and after a lot of messing around with parallel port configurations I'm now almost there.

The final issue I appear to have is that the pin numbers change during operation. When I first fire up Mach3 every thing works fine and I can jog the axis or run a program ok. Shortly after startup, anything from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, one or more of the axis will suddenly stop functioning. This primerrily effects the x axis but has also occurred occasionally on both y and z as well.

After a lot of head scratching and cups of tea I have tracked the issue down to Pin numbers being changed randomly whilst using the software. When I first start Mach3 I check the pin assignments are as set in the XML and everything works fine. Once the issue occurs if I go back into the pin and port settings I can see that the step pin number assigned to the effected axis has been changed to something different to that originally configured.  If I then change the pin back to what it should be it fires back into life.... Until the same thing happens again a few minutes later.

I would like to get this sorted before shelling out for a license so would appreciate anyone's help.

PS. I have seen someone else had a similar issue but there was no response on the forum.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,4197.0.html