Messages

7101

General Mach Discussion / Re: New to Mach3 and CNC No motor movement.

« on: March 22, 2017, 02:28:16 AM »

Hi,
start at the beginning and work your way through. Expecting to be able to hook everything up and have motors move straight up is
an absolute joke.

First, can you enable Mach3?. Do you have an estop fitted? If so does it indeed disable Mach? When the estop is cleared can Mach
be re-enabled? With Mach enabled can you jog the axes using the keyboard? Can you drive, say G0 or G1, axes with MDI?.
When I say drive here I mean do the axis DROs track up and down.

I'm not familiar with the UC100. Is there some test you can perform that indicates that it is communicating with Mach? Can you manually
trigger an estop from the UC100. If you assign an available input pin to Machs Probe input can you see the input LED on Machs Diagnostic
page light/unlight when manually triggering the input?

As you can see I'm trying here to establish first that Mach is operable, that you can jog the axes, that Mach can communicate to your
motion controller/BOB and that inputs to the BOB can be seen by Mach. All of these things must be good before you have a chance to
move a motor.

Craig

7102

General Mach Discussion / Re: New to Mach3 and CNC No motor movement.

« on: March 16, 2017, 01:41:54 PM »

Hi,
if you use a UC100 then the Driver Test is redundant. The Driver Test is a means of establishing the health or otherwise of
the PP.

Craig

7103

General Mach Discussion / Re: New to Mach3 and CNC No motor movement.

« on: March 16, 2017, 01:58:53 AM »

Hi,
I'm guessing that you are using a parallel port? If so, what does the Driver Test program say?  If Mach3 cant produce good clean pulses
the nothing will happen. Post a screen shot of the Driver Test and lets have a look...

Craig

7104

General Mach Discussion / Re: Simple Win 7 Question?

« on: March 16, 2017, 01:54:00 AM »

Hi,
this is a frequently asked question. Have a look at the threads in the 'Mach under Vista' section of the forum, there are lots of posts
about it.

The upshot is that 64 bit architecture precludes drivers of the type necessary for Machs parallel port, that can only be accomplished with
a 32 bit architecture.

The good news is that XP and Win7 32bit both do a good job of running PP if you wish. If you really want 64 bit then use an external
motion controller which can be had for as little as $100.

I have run Mach3 with 32 bit PP, Mach4 with both 32 and 64 bit OS with an ESS. I think the ESS is great but 32/64 makes NO difference
to how Mach runs. If you want 64 bit its NOT because Mach runs better its because you WANT some other program that does need it and
really shouldn't even be installed on a machine control platform.

I have installed the barest minimum software on my machine control platform because I've had personal, expensive and painful experience
of what happens when some other program or process starts or runs while you are machining, Mach loses the plot and CRASH!

Craig

7105

General Mach Discussion / Re: sudden onset of Stepper stalling

« on: March 13, 2017, 06:27:08 AM »

Hi,
while an external motion controller like the UC100 is a good idea it seems to me you should try to solve this issue without
introducing a whole new bunch of variables, like how you've set up your new controller.

If it is something like a sagging power supply or a weak driver circuit it will come back to haunt you irrespective of what controller
you use.

Do you use the same drivers for all axes? You could for instance swap the X and Z axis drivers over and if the intermittent stall now
occurs in the X axis rather than Z then the driver is bad or going that way. If the fault sticks with the Z axis then I would be looking
at the supply. Does the Z stall when going upwards? It may be the weight of the spindle and carrier is just enuf to cause the motor
to stall. If you increase the current drive and the fault goes away then it suggests that the motor is operating at close to its max torque
at that speed. If your drivers can handle more voltage and you can increase your supply voltage it will help maintain motor torque at
speed.

7106

General Mach Discussion / Re: Router stopped less than midways

« on: March 13, 2017, 06:09:34 AM »

Hi,
sounds like electrical noise triggered the limit. It will recur at random times until you eliminate the noise source and/or protect
sensitive signal circuits.

You can start a program from part way through but be warned that you will gouge and otherwise wreck a few pieces of work
before you learn all the quirks. Suggest you try a few run-from-here instructions in scrap material first. Read the instructions in
the manual Mach3Mill_1.84.pdf section 6.2.7.8 on page 6-7.

Craig

7107

General Mach Discussion / Re: RPM / Feed Rates Again?

« on: March 13, 2017, 05:57:09 AM »

Hi,
I go with Dave, HSMAdvisor is good, so much so I bought it!

Don't know whether its much cop on non-metals.

The calculation really comes down to chipload. I use very small endmills (0.4-0.5mm) for circuit boards and I allow 1% diameter per flute per rev.
This keeps the cutting forces mid to low when the cut depth is 50% of diameter. For larger endmills say 3-6mm I go to 2% per flute per rev and
decent size ones say 12-16mm 3% per flute per rev.

Revs is just surface speed, with carbide 50m/min in stainless, 100m/min in steel, 200-500 m/min in aluminium or copper if you can clear the chips well
and/or coolant.

These rule-of-thumb numbers come from using HSMAdvisor and will get you in the ball park straight away.

Chiploads of 0.1 to 0.18 sounds awfully big chips. What units are you using?

Craig

7108

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mill problem?? Having a crazy jitter

« on: March 10, 2017, 12:39:59 AM »

Hi,
when I first started with Mach3, before I had Home switches I used to set 0,0 at roughly the centre of the table.

I noted that whenever Mach crossed the positive to negative boundary it would hiccup ever so slightly, not enough to
lose steps, more of an audio thing. While I never proved it I was of the opinion that as the machine co-ords passed thru
zero the PC had to do extra work to avoid a divide-by-zero type numeric fault.

In more recent time my machine homes to an extreme corner and so my machine never passes though machine co-ord
of zero...unless I'm on my way to a crash!. The little audio hiccup disappeared and has never come back.

Craig

7109

General Mach Discussion / Re: Simulation Mode

« on: March 10, 2017, 12:27:27 AM »

Hi neatmachine,
welcome aboard. If you do not have a motion control device, ie do not have either the parallel port software installed
or any other motion control plugin installed then the 500 line limit does not apply.

In other words if your PC is incapable of controlling a machine you can play with it to your hearts content, if it is capable
then you need a licence to overcome the 500 line limit.

Mach4 doesn't have a line limit but runs for about 6 minutes before stopping if unlicenced.

Craig

7110

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can this computer run mach3

« on: March 06, 2017, 12:56:15 AM »

Hi,
I thought you were supposed to be 'arse about face and on your head'...lol

Probably the most common configuration is XY 0,0 is with the tool at the extreme left hand side of the table and the
table at its furtherest away from you, ie the 'lower left hand corner'. Note this may not be the machine co-ordinate 0,0
but your work co-ords. As the table moves left X increases from 0 and as the table moves toward you Y increases from 0.

I remember it as the same orientation and direction as an X Y Cartesian graph that we were all taught at school.
The active point is the tool tip.

You can reverse directions by checking/unchecking active low on your direction pins. It pays however to keep in mind
the 'standard' orientation if you ever get given some code to cut or if you wish to post your own code.

Craig