Messages

5461

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 28, 2018, 01:37:45 AM »

Hi,
haven't spoken to anyone whos tried the LattePanda with Mach4 but the price is brill, just the OS alone costs more than the complete setup!

http://www.lattepanda.com/

Craig

5462

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lathe wizard scripts

« on: January 28, 2018, 01:13:36 AM »

Hi,
don't know about wizards but what about:
Mach4Hobby\Modules\AddOns\LatheCannedCycles

They are complied so you cant really see whats in them. I assume these sre the little suckers I'm having trouble loading from time to time.

Craig

5463

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simulate PROBE w/Keyboard HOTKEY

« on: January 28, 2018, 12:12:15 AM »

Hi,
no I don't think so. I tried a while back without success. You can cause the Machs Probe input to operate with a keyboard input but its your motion controller
that does the majority of the probing function.

Even if Machs PROBE input goes active low it doesn't tell your motion controller to stop and report back to Mach the position at probe strike.

Craig

5464

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 Button OFFLINE

« on: January 27, 2018, 11:59:12 PM »

Hi,
you say that when you enable /disable Mach ENABLE#0 changes state and the relay you've hooked to pin 1 operates.

The macros m210 and m211 turn ENABLE#0 on and off, it should therefore change your relay as well.

If it doesn't then its not ENABLE#0 which the enable/disable button of Mach operates. Can you post a screen shot of the Mach output setup page and a screen shot of the
CSIMO plugin page of pin assignments?

Craig

5465

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Is Mach4 really Hobby Material?

« on: January 27, 2018, 04:24:45 PM »

Hi Reinhard,

I already have an ESS, but I consider feed override so important, that I'm not sure, whether to start with ESS or sell it and go for DSPMC from start on.

Mach4 with the ESS controller has feedrate override and as far as I can tell by standing at the machine operating it seems to be instantaneous.

If there is anything that the ESS lacks is analogue inputs. PoKeys do a good job and PMDX also have a couple of analogue input channels. Of course Galil
do them as well but at a cost as do Vital Systems.

Vital Systems boards offer closed loop operation, if you pay the extra, but if I understand it reads an encoder and produces a high resolution analogue voltage
to drive a DC amplifier which in turn drives a DC servo. DC servos are perfectly capable but pretty old school by now....additionally have you seen how expensive
they've become? Bang for your buck go for AC servos, the loop is closed by the drive, and usually by the same manufacturer with very VERY good results, better
than I could program a PID loop anyway. If you accept as I do that the drive/AC servo loop do as good or better job than any controller then you have paid
a premium for closed loop feedback which is not really required.

A worthwhile feature offered by Galil, Vital Systems and Pokeys is the ability to micro program the controller. You pay extra to have Vital Systems boards do it.
The advantage is that you can use that fine grained programming ability to close control loops OTHER than motor loops. Galil have lead the field in this regard
for many years.

Warp9 have a plan to release an API for the ESS. To be honest I can't see that it will happen quickly but it would add some of the ability of the above. It doesn't seem
likely that it  will ever match Galil for this style of programming.

If you already have an ESS I would carry on with it. The ESS plugin lacks at this time THC and lathe threading but are being worked on.
Those extra features including closed loop servo control and microprogramming on a Vital Systems board are going to cost $1500 or more.

The first is no question. Learning is my main hobby Smiley
... but the second is.

The ESS will provide plenty of learning opportunities!

Craig

5466

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Unable to connect to ShuttlePro

« on: January 27, 2018, 01:30:30 PM »

Hi,
try Configure/Mach/Plugins check Shuttle Pro and Apply. Restart Mach.

Craig

5467

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 Button OFFLINE

« on: January 27, 2018, 01:11:42 PM »

Hi,
downloaded CSIMO manual for your controller, plenty about setting it up with Mach3 but nothing about Mach4.

CS Labs claim this is Mach4 ready so make them provide the documentation and support necessary. CS labs have been in the Mach4 market
for only a few months, clearly they are not as ready as they think they are.

Craig

5468

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 Button OFFLINE

« on: January 27, 2018, 12:04:07 PM »

Hi,
the LED on the screen is Machs output signal, ENABLE0

You have to use the CSIMO plugin to connect Machs output to one of the available digital output pins. It can be done. Its absolutely basic to any
CNC controller that you can turn a pin on and off.

You are correct you cannot assign two outputs to one pin, but that is no what you a re trying to do here. We have two macros one to turn ENABLE0 off
and the other to turn ENABLE0 on, just the one output.

Craig

5469

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 27, 2018, 04:13:40 AM »

Hi Russ,
I think that combo should be fine.

I run my machine with a dual core Atom CPU with on chip graphics on a miniITX board with 4 Gig. smurph calls the graphics on the Atom 'execrable' and its CPU power
is even less than a single core Athalon XP CPU I used years ago but it runs Mach4 just fine.

smuprh has also experimented with a 'mud' board, a slightly more powerful CPU than mine and he reports that it works fine as well. I think the graphics demand
by Mach4 is very much less than Mach3, at least once the initial draw is done.

Any attempt to redraw while Mach3 was running caused Mach3 to halt with the usual consequences. Mach4 on the other hand has never given me any grief like that.
The only real problem with the Atom is that if I try and load a largish file (about 5M) its very slow to load and draw. The second issue is that with a 32bit OS the CPU
can only address about 2.5 Gig of RAM. As it turns out that has been sufficient for my machine. I recently had to install 32bit Windows 7 onto my laptop after a meltdown
left me without a usable copy of Windows 8. The laptop has 8 Gig installed but only 2.5 usable and I keep running into memory shortages, never thought I'd say it but
I miss Windows 8!

Craig

5470

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Is Mach4 really Hobby Material?

« on: January 27, 2018, 03:45:59 AM »

Hi,
better documentation would be great. I have some sympathy for NFS it that there is a huge investment in time and resources to generate good documenation.
Simply put they don't have the resources to do it, they need to concentrate on those development issues that result in sales, particularly OEM sales.

Having said that, NFS has also been guilty of not even annotating the documents that they do have with issues that arise and are bought to thier attention.
I have one example where in the end I opened a support ticket to resolve a question, NFS duly got back to me and answered the question and could have annotated
the API.chm very simply but did not do so. Sure enough a few months later I was answering the same question for someone else on the forum.

I think Reinhard has a similar example where he put in an effort but no-one from NFS bothered to incorperate that contribution into the 'database'.

Eventually NFS are going to have to document their program....taking advantage of those tidbits of analysis/insight/experience developed by users seems useful.

Craig