Messages

2501

Finished Screens / Re: Mach3 2010 Screenset - Now available

« on: May 13, 2019, 02:27:01 PM »

Hi,
when you move the toolpath display Mach has to compute a redraw and that starves the motion control of CPU service.

With some very big files its recommended to turn the toolpath display off altogether.

Craig

2502

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4Core and IPC dll goes crazy(call to a non-existent memory cell errors)

« on: May 13, 2019, 03:05:59 AM »

Hi,
the native scripting language in Mach4 is Lua.....so why use C++?

Craig

2503

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: XHC motion card and Mach4

« on: May 13, 2019, 03:04:09 AM »

Hi,
plenty of people have tried but to my knowledge no-one has had a good result.

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=36023.msg246713#msg246713

There are better choices for a Mach4 compatible controller.

Craig

2504

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Stepper motors move jerky and weird

« on: May 12, 2019, 02:18:43 PM »

Hi,

Ethernet SmoothStepper
https://warp9td.com/

UC300
https://www.cncdrive.com/UC300ETH.html

57CNC
https://www.poscope.com/product/pokeys57cnc/

Craig

2505

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors stalling /growling

« on: May 11, 2019, 11:17:29 PM »

Hi,
sorry, didn't mean to confuse.

ESS stands for Ethernet SmoothStepper, an external motion controller made by a US company Warp9TD.

There are a number of manufacturers including some highly regarded US and European Manufacturers and some widely criticized
Chinese manufacturers. Leaving aside the quality of the device and the support for it...what do you get with an external motion
controller?

Mach, the Windows application program we see is a Gcode interpreter and motion planner. The planned motion is a string
of numerical data describing the position of all axes in 1 ms time slices. A PC is good at crunching numbers as so it can decode
Gcode and plan motion very easily.

What happens to the numerical motion plan?

In the case of a parallel port machine the numerical data is transferred to Machs pulse engine, a block of code living in
kernel 0 level of the CPU. It calculates the required pulse streams and produces them with interrupt driven timers.

A PC's CPU is not optimized for this. Firstly it almost has to shove Windows out of the way and Windows doesn't like it
and fights back. Secondly Windows uses the CPU's interrupt system extensively for its own purposes. We cannot use the system
exclusively for our timers because Window would crash pronto. Lastly a PC's CPU does not have dedicated hardware timers
and so there is a software overhead associated with an interrupt driven timer.

The programming community all said 'it cant be done' and yet Art Fennerty did it and gave hobbyists a cheap (free) motion
controller and that's responsible for the huge popularity of Mach3.

About 10 years ago several manufacturers started making external controllers. They take the numerical data from Mach's motion
planner and generate the required pulse streams for the motors. They all use FPGA's, or microcontrollers or DSP chips or
sometimes all three. All of these devices have sophisticated built in hardware timers and can produce very fast and accurate
pulse streams well in excess of what Mach's pulse engine can do.

What do you get for it all? Firstly the PC's CPU is unloaded of the burden of producing pulse streams and therefore runs Mach
without the stuttering and stalling that often plagues parallel port machines. It means you can run 32 or 64 bit PC's (cf
32 bit only for parallel port), any Windows OS including Windows 10 (cf Windows7 and earlier only for parallel port) and you can
use laptops or desktops (cf desktop only for parallel port).

External motion controllers are faster than a parallel port, the ESS for instance can produce pulse streams up to 4 MHz,
compare that to Mach's parallel port of 25kHz (default). It means you can run high resolution servos and steppers that you
can't with a parallel port.

The ESS I mentioned is connected to the PC by an Ethernet cable and it in turn connects to a breakout board. at the current time
an ESS is about $190US. There are much cheaper units but all the good (US and European) ones are in the same price
bracket, ie not cheap. There are some rubbishy Chinese ones  cheap....but they don't work well....if at all.

I used Mach's parallel port on a dual core Atom min-ITX board PC for a couple of years. It has one built in port and I added another
on a PCI card. It worked really well. You could make it stutter and stall if you were silly but by and large it was pretty good.

Then I bought an ESS. I could now run my steppers 33% faster without losing steps and they seemed to run cooler and
'sweeter' than before. I didn't expect that sort of improvement. I would have sworn that then parallel port was extracting
the best from my steppers but the SmoothStepper is just that...smooth. Mach is very much less inclined
to stutter or stall if some other program is running or it needs to compute a redraw.....and redraws often bugger up
the parallel port.

I apologize if it seems that I'm trying to 'sell' you another piece of equipment but my experience is that the simplicity
and performance that a good external motion controller offers is just light years ahead of a parallel port.
The chances are that an ESS, or other good quality external controller like a UC300 or 57CNC, are cheaper than
a new PC......and you wont have any bother trying to get a parallel port to work!

Craig

2506

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New PC and after restore "mcLua.mcc no such file" error

« on: May 11, 2019, 05:43:34 PM »

Hi,
essentially yes.

I'm  not sure it will solve your problem but it will certainly prevent another problem in the future.

I came to this because I used the wx4.set screen set from NFS. I added to it, tweaked and generally played with it.
THEN I downloaded another more recent Mach4 build from NFS and my old copy of wx4.set got overwritten by  the
fresh copy and all my work was lost.

This was the education I needed to make my own screen set, which is a renamed version of my favorite, wx4.set.
Thereafter all mods and edits occurred on my individualized screen set.

So your installation has two unique parts, your profile and the screen set. You have saved your profile but have you saved an
exact copy of the screen set you were using?

I'm guessing that when you set up your new PC you installed a fresh copy of Mach which has the standard wxRouter.set
included. However your profile was calling for  custom code which is not in the standard screen set but in your previvous
screen set.

2507

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New PC and after restore "mcLua.mcc no such file" error

« on: May 11, 2019, 03:31:15 PM »

Hi,
all the different scripts and fragments of Lua code throughout Mach's screen get rounded up into one big file
and compiled, its called Mclua.mcc.

It may well be that one fragment, your m6 macro for instance, is not complete or corrupt such that it cant compile
and therefore the overall Lua chunk cannot compile either and therefore no valid Mclua.mcc.

Do you have an individualized screen set?

If I read the error message correctly it seems to suggest that you use the NFS supplied Router screen set. If that is the
case make a copy of it but give it an individualized name and then use that screen set in your profile.

Any tweaks or screen edits will therefore be saved in your individualized screen set and not get overwritten when a new
Mach build is installed (along with a fresh copy of the Router screen set).

Craig

2508

Mach3 under Vista / Re: Stepper motors move jerky and weird

« on: May 11, 2019, 02:40:45 PM »

Hi,
while interesting to look at the motor traces are no going to help you diagnose the fault.

Even traces of the step input signals will probably not help a great deal. The timing jitter of Machs parallel port
is often 4us or so. Thus even a 'good' pulse train is going to have jitter that would render the trace un-readable.
There are scopes that record histograms of the signal under test and would be ideal but they are specialist devices
and unlikely that you have one.

Machs parallel port driver is code that runs at  kernel level 0 within the PC's CPU. Windows never anticipated that
the PC would be used that way, and the computing world looked on in amazement when Art Fennerty wrote it, all swearing
that 'its not possible'.

I think what you have happening is that some PC's run Machs parallel port well and others do not. Some old XP clunker
will do a good job whereas a powerful PC with 'muscles on it muscles' wont run at all.......and no real way to tell.
Once upon a time there was list of things you could do to improve your PC for running the parallel port, it was quite
extensive, about 40 items and took several hours to work through.  I haven't seen or heard of it for ages.

This variability of performance (of the parallel port) on different PC's is one of the drawbacks of the parallel port, and has been
with us from the get go. It must be said though, provided you were prepared to try several PC's to get a good one that the
parallel port works pretty well and for free. It was that fact that allowed Mach3 to become as popular as it has with such a loyal
user base.

One solution that you might consider is to buy an external motion controller like an Ethernet SmoothStepper. An external
controller removes from the PC the need to generate high accuracy pulse streams for which a PC's CPU is poorly suited.
An external controller would allow use of 64 (or 32) bit Windows up to and including Windows10, you could use a laptop
whereas the parallel port required a desktop. Mach running through an external motion controller is very very much
less subject to stalling or stuttering due to extraneous software/services running on the PC.

If you do want to consider an external motion controller don't buy Chinese junk, they often don't work at all, or work well
even if they work, and you wont get any manufacturers support.

Craig

2509

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors stalling /growling

« on: May 11, 2019, 03:41:42 AM »

Hi,
I read the same post:

its the best its done but i can run the mach 3 demo maybe 3 times without any problems but the next 3 times it will stall or have what sounds like vibration

That does not sound like a CV issue to me. Sometimes it runs and then on other occasions 'it sounds like a vibration'.
I guess that 'sounds like a vibration' is excessive jitter in the pulse stream.

Proving it is hard and solving it harder still.

Personally fooling around with a parallel port is so last century....get an ESS and never look back!

Craig

2510

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors stalling /growling

« on: May 11, 2019, 02:41:35 AM »

Hi,
who cares about CV, at the moment OP is struggling to get the motors to run under certain circumstances
and I don't think kernel speed is the answer. Vast numbers of users run Mach's parallel port at 25kHz without
problem....so why can't OP?

Craig