Messages

5961

General Mach Discussion / Re: General question about small CNC mills

« on: November 08, 2017, 01:57:30 AM »

Hi Billy,
kool. Stainless is a challenge. You've really got to bore into it...if your too timid it work hardens to hell and then you'll be in real trouble.
Get yourself some good carbide endmills. Funnily enough the hardest grades are not what you want...you need tough endmills with a strong core.
Its likely you'll break them before the coatings give you any real advantage so until you've had some practice save the dollars on coatings.

I get a lot of really small endmills and drills for circuit boards. This outfit sells Kyocera Tycom, a good brand cheaply and I've bought hundreds off
him. I would suggest something in the 1/8 to 1/4 size. If you have a torquey slow spindle go for 1/4, a higher speed but with less torque go for 1/8.
If you have less than about 0.5 ftlb (0.75Nm) don't bother unless you want to break untold endmills.

http://stores.ebay.com/carbideplus/

Do you have cooling...you'll want it ...lots  and lots of it. More to do with flushing chips out of the cutzone than cooling....nothing but nothing buggers you
up like recutting chips no matter what the material, but you'll absolutely not get away with it in stainless.

Craig

5962

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can I install the Mach3 software on more than one computer?

« on: November 08, 2017, 01:36:03 AM »

Hi Billy,
I'm sure your wife hopes so too! LOL

Craig

5963

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach 4 and parallel port

« on: November 08, 2017, 01:33:44 AM »

Hi,
yes that's correct, the ESS is Ethernet Smooth Stepper. The Ethernet offers measurably less latency than USB. USB still works pretty damn well, latency
or not.

When I made the decision to switch to Mach4 my intention was to use a parallel port, after all I'd had plenty of success with Mach3 and dual PP. But then
it occurred to me that despite buying secondhand off Ebay I paid an average of $200 each for my Vexta drivers over $200 for my steppers with low backlash
planetary gearboxes, over $1000 for a German made spindle....and the list goes on. Why would I pinch pennies after spending lots for the best I could afford
for everything else?

I have found myself in similar situations before where I come on all righteous about spending a sum of money when I have blithely done exactly that for
another item which may have less overall impact than the item in question. That's how the ESS is, a smallish investment in the overall scale of what I've
put into my mill and yet it has probably the most impact on how it will perform. So I bought it. It has proven to be money well spent. Its not magic by
any stretch of the imagination but I have smoother and more reliable motion as a result. In addition I've had to learn a whole bunch about Ethernet
comm protocols, the internals of motion controls and so on. Any and all learning is a positive outcome for our hobby.

I think your strategy is fine. Quite frankly worrying about the charge pump I think is a waste of energy and I don't think anyone in NFS or Art F have any interest
is such an arcane fault. I never had a charge pump with Mach3 and don't need one with Mach4 either. The parallel port still works pretty damn well. Art has
said right from the get go that Darwin will never have all the features that the Mach3 PP had, like single point lathe threading and so on. When you exhaust the
possibilities of Darwin there are a number of external motion controllers around the $200 mark.

The question is best placed on the Warp9 forum but the USB Smooth Stepper has a smaller FPGA IC in it than the Ethernet Smooth Stepper. There is a question
whether there is enough silicon real estate in the smaller FPGA to achieve all that has been accomplished with the ESS. It seems the answer is....probably....
but until Andy actually tries it no one knows for sure.

Either way I suspect that over a period of time you'll become addicted to the flexibility of Mach4 and quietly Mach3 will drop out of sight. I've never really fiddled with
Modbus in Mach3 until recently, trying to help someone else, and it made me realise that the Mach4 Modbus plugin is JUST SO MUCH BETTER!!! This is just the
latest realisation of what amounts to quite a list of powerful and flexible features built into Mach4s structure.

Craig

5964

Modbus / Re: Who can I call to help me setup this automation direct vfd

« on: November 07, 2017, 10:51:19 PM »

Hi,
I must say that I found the Mach3 Mobus plugin quite confusing and still there are details which are still obscure.

I have done a little bit of work with the Mach4 Modbus plugin and while I struggled to start with I found it to be much easier
and complete than the Mach3 plugin. In particular in Mach4 you set up registers in the register plugin with names and
descriptions to make it human readable. The Modbus plugin has the means of concatenating the registers to form a
block.

The registers can be written to and read by Mach4 PLC, in similar manner to Mach3 Brains but they can also be written/read
by macros or any other Lua module within Mach4, very very much more flexible and easier to understand.

Would commend you download Mach4, run the Sim(ulator) plugin and play with the Modbus and Register plugins, light years
ahead of Mach3 IMHO.

Craig

5965

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach 4 and parallel port

« on: November 07, 2017, 09:12:33 PM »

Hi,
Mach4 and ESS, previously Mach and dual parallel port.

Overall I rate the Mach4/ESS combination better. It terms of movement there's not much in it, my steppers run
smoother and cooler, not a lot but some, and about 1/3 faster than before. Mach4 has proven to be a bit more stable
than Mach3 and very much less sensitive to CPU demand, not that I had any complaint against Mach3.

I definitely like Lua/wxWigets/Mach API and Mach4s modular structure over Mach3, very much more dependable and
flexible than Mach3.

To my knowledge the only features that I'm missing are THC and lathe threading. I don't have a plasma or a lathe
so is not of concern to me. Those features are part of the motion controller so the ball is in Warp9s court at the moment.
Much of the preliminary work is done so by years end or early in the new year those features will be added.

When I switched I had like you thought to have both operating so I could change back and forth at will. In the event
I found with the ESS that was not easy and further once I had Mach4 running there was nothing about Mach3 that I missed.
Whether I would come to the same conclusion if I were operating as a business I don't know.

If you were making your own machine, particularly some specialist machine for coil winding or cylindrical grinding or whatever
the flexibility of Mach4 would be a slam dunk.

Craig

5966

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach 4 and parallel port

« on: November 07, 2017, 07:36:50 PM »

Hi,
yeah, I've got a 'you beaut' low backlash angle drive like that, kool, but so far i haven't got around to exploiting it.
My steppers 'sound' so much happier when being driven by the ESS.

Craig

5967

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: computer requirements for mach 4

« on: November 07, 2017, 07:34:22 PM »

Hi,
sorry VGA is in the 'recently fossilised' category. You'll need an HDMI monitor/TV...

Great little unit otherwise and for less than we used to pay for a CPU on its own and Win10 thrown in...
hard to complain at that value.

Craig

5968

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach 4 and parallel port

« on: November 07, 2017, 04:01:17 PM »

Hi,

Brand new - on the shelf - never used - never needed

Why did you buy it if you've never used it?

The ESS allowed me to up the speed of the steppers from 1800 rpm to 2400 rpm with the same heat load
and better reliability (loss of steps/stall). Mach is now very much less sensitive to stopping due to other software
and screen redraws with the ESS aside from having a much greater choice of PCs and OSs to run Mach.

Craig

5969

General Mach Discussion / Re: Depth Not Changing in Mach3

« on: November 07, 2017, 03:52:55 PM »

Hi Billy,
yeah 15 degree bits are VERY tender.

Craig

5970

Modbus / Re: Who can I call to help me setup this automation direct vfd

« on: November 07, 2017, 02:35:13 PM »

Hi,
not much. I have been using Mach4 for about a year and really have no desire to immerce myself in VB programming,
in fact that was the principle reason for me to migrate to Mach4; so I didn't have to deal with VB and all its bugs and
confusion.

Craig