Messages

11

General Mach Discussion / Re: mach3 material thickness

« on: April 04, 2017, 03:53:33 PM »

CAM

12

General Mach Discussion / Re: Does Mach3/4 support Adruino/CNC shield boards?

« on: March 02, 2017, 05:43:35 AM »

I have said board Adruino UNO/CNC shield combo.

You would ask the suppliers of the Board/Shield combo as it would be their responsibility to create and support a plugin to support their hardware,

 - Nick

13

General Mach Discussion / Re: Dual spindle control on mach3

« on: February 23, 2017, 03:42:57 PM »

My project requires the control of two spindles within a dual spindle cnc machine.

If you tell the people you are asking for help with this what your aims are rather than drip-feeding them information it might help them to help you.
It sounds like you have designed a project with vertically opposed, simultaneously and independently controlled spindles for which, at the very least, you will need to hand code or possibly write your own CAM system.

14

General Mach Discussion / Re: UC300 (USB) to Mach3 erratic connection losses

« on: February 20, 2017, 03:45:04 PM »

There are those who build CNC systems professionally who will not use USB because once everything is configured correctly it will still sometimes still fail to be reliable enough to run a system acceptably.
Have you considered swapping to Ethernet?

15

General Mach Discussion / Re: UC300 (USB) to Mach3 erratic connection losses

« on: February 20, 2017, 03:36:22 PM »

well, since you are/were in the IT business allow me to ask another question:

 is there a rationale for the change in erratic behavior ? why would the frequency of disconnections vary from time to time without any visible (to the User) correlation with the job given to Mach 3 ? the only coarse correlation I have is that the disconnection rate was higher with Mach 3 RUNNING than IDLE and clearly smaller (but not zero) without Mach 3.

 enjoy your evening, Philippe

In a Wintel support environment you have two choices, ask Microsoft for a solution and/or explanation or figure out a fix, unless you're a truly massive client who can threaten them financially guess which is usually quicker? ;-)
It's simply an old problem with a known fix, without the source code and a team of developers I doubt you'd ever get to the bottom of the problem and given the complexity of the Windows environment I suspect the cost/benefit analysis wouldn't be favourable.
I was just very grateful that there was a way to disable USB hub power saving and moved on as it was no longer a problem

16

General Mach Discussion / Re: UC300 (USB) to Mach3 erratic connection losses

« on: February 20, 2017, 03:12:43 PM »

Perhaps a short hint pointing to this potential issue in the User Manual of the UC300

It's old enough news in the IT world that their techs have probably long since lost it to their "assumed level of knowledge", I was regularly dealing with this issue over 8 years ago in an IT support role.

17

General Mach Discussion / Re: UC300 (USB) to Mach3 erratic connection losses

« on: February 19, 2017, 07:03:03 PM »

BTW: PC power management is "never sleeps"

In Device Manager your USB controllers may well have settings which "Allow the computer to turn off this device" regardless of your "Power Management" settings

18

General Mach Discussion / Re: How many Mach3, Mach4 users?

« on: February 19, 2017, 06:31:26 PM »

I currently use Mach3, my next step will probably be the mid-priced standalone Chinese controllers which look like they'll be a better solution than PC +Controller Software+Controller Hardware within the next year or so.

19

General Mach Discussion / Re: Restart while stop held in?

« on: August 23, 2016, 10:24:01 AM »

You really shouldn't keep getting VFD errors, there's a setting wrong, the unit is wrong for the application or it's a faulty unit.
Have you considered replacing the VFD?

20

General Mach Discussion / Re: Compaq pc any good?

« on: August 06, 2016, 02:13:19 PM »

I've used D510, D530 and dc7100 with the integrated parallel port on a really old un-buffered Router CNC control box sucessfully, I have a couple of dc5850 PCs with StarTech PCI express and Maplin own brand parallel cards for testing,

 - Nick