Messages

721

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: add instance to mach4

« on: April 17, 2022, 04:03:42 AM »

Hi,
the 'instance' refers not to the Gcode but to Mach. Mach4 was always intended to run multiple instances.

For example you might have one instance running a three axis mill, a second instance running the sub spindle  for a mill-turn machine, and yet a a third instance
to run the automatic pallet changer.

With such a machine you need to specify which of the several instances your code applies to.

To my knowledge multiple instances are not available publicly yet....but one day.

Craig

722

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 / Win 10 / touch screen

« on: April 14, 2022, 03:35:58 AM »

Hi,
Mach4 has a very good GUI editor and so you can make your own screens very easily, Mach3 is a nightmare by comparison, although doable
if you really have a mind.

What you need is large, and I mean LARGE buttons with a very significant space surrounding it to any other buttons or you will have problems.
The size of the buttons very much limits what can be displayed on the screen.

You may have noticed screen shots of Hass machines, Fanuc machines etc, and may have noticed they tend to have minimalist screen sets, have you ever
wondered why hobbyists screen sets like Mach3, Mach4 and UCCNC all have such overloaded screen sets?

To be honest I have a PC monitor, a regular keyboard and mouse right beside the operators station of my machine. Its perfectly adequate. I have no
real incentive to do anything about it, its just not a bottleneck.

The last few weeks I've made a real effort to design, build and install sliding way covers.I picked up the last lot of fittings from my sheetmetal guy
this morning. Keeping the worst of the crap and coolant from my linear guides and ballscrews is a bottleneck.

I'm also making a fourth axis, I have all the parts and have made good progress. I had my workmate/employee spend six hours today
turning up a shaft/chuck adaptor out of solid 4140. I have work, paying work, for a fourth axis...so I need it operational. Another week and it will be done.

I am debating whether to buy an electrical cabinet, around $1000NZD, as it needs to be 1000mm x 800mm, or maybe have my sheetmetal guy make
something for me. I need to get all of the electronics out from 'under the machine' into a cabinet where I can be assured that no inadvertent coolant
leaks are going to screw everything up. Not only that I need to clear away from under the machine so I can put in a decent coolant pump and tank.


I have a 25l tank an 1/8th hp pump at the moment, and its been good....for the money....but I need better, a lot better now. I need a tank of about
75l to 100l, and I need a variable delivery pump up to about 1hp. I've got a baby 3phase motor, and that should do the trick with a VFD.
I also need a big pullout tray filter to try to catch and filter out as many chips as I can. I seem to spend half my life running around clearing
chip traps, topping up the tank, and/or mopping up leaks and spills. You'd wonder where all the coolant goes. As I say I have a 25l tank, and yet I
have to top it up to the tune of 4l daily. I know I get a few leaks but I'd swear never more than a few hundred ml....so where does all that coolant go?

I'm in the middle of designing and building a new breakout board for my mill. I made a three port (51 IO's) breakout board split into two 180mm x 60mm boards
about six months ago, and they have worked well for me. This new design will be three ports (51 IO's) and the ESS will mate directly to it by
pushing down onto female connectors on the breakout board and measure 240mm x 190mm. It will have a few improvements over my earlier design.
It will have six differential Step/Dir output pairs, rather than the five I have currently. This will allow me to use my servo based spindle as a C axis.
It will have improvements in the PWM-to-analogue circuit and power supply distribution. The circuit is designed, the board is designed, so I'll have
the board ready to populate by this time next week, just in time for the last few electronic parts to turn up.

So the last three to four weeks I have a real push on my machine. I have to prioritise what I need, as I only have a certain budget and a certain amount of time
before I start cheesing off customers.
1) Way covers
2) Fourth axis
3) Consolidation of electronics into a cabinet
4) Coolant tank, pump and filters.

Craig.

723

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 / Win 10 / touch screen

« on: April 13, 2022, 08:30:37 PM »

Hi,
I used to run Mach4, on occasion, on my laptop and it had a touch screen. All that was necessary was to push the onscreen button, I did not have to do any software updates or anything.
I believe Touch Screen support is a Windows feature and does not require anything special from the application. If this is indeed the case then just use a touch sensitive screen and Mach3
would work seamlessly.

I found that you need a big screen, or alternately edit the screen so that the buttons are big, otherwise you WILL inadvertently hit a button next door with potential crash consequences,
not to mention crap and oil from getting on the screen.

I think a good quality industrial grade trackball is probably the right choice for CNC.

Craig

724

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 09, 2022, 07:43:33 PM »

Hi,
yes I saw that list, but nothing stood out to me that was going to do as we want. Maybe I just don't understand this manufacturers terminology.

By-and-large all AC servos work the same, and the vast majority of manufacturers have the same features. They may have different names and values but they are all there.

Some of the cheaper Chinese brands have poor documentation, and I'm sorry to say but this looks like an example. Having said that, those parameters which are listed and explained
should give an absolutely superb servo, certainly better than any stepper you've ever encountered, and at a fantastic price. Every once an a while you need to dive deep into the servo
programming and that's where the lack of documentation really hurts.

Delta is a Taiwanese brand but manufactured in China. The documentation is very good indeed, and the set-up and tuning software is better again. Delta are not the cheapest brand,
but they are a lot cheaper than any US, Japanese or European brand, with comparable quality, documentation, set-up and tuning software and support. With Delta servos, with which I am
most familiar, I can certainly program an acceleration/deceleration profile. The other servo for which I have some experience is Allen Bradley, and with that servo too I can program an
acceleration/deceleration profile.

I think you need to work out how to get Mach/ESS/BoB to produce the required Step/Dir signals to get the servo to run. Depending on how Mach3 applies, or does not apply, a profile,
then you may have to dive into servo tuning. You might also want to consider the C axis solution.

I use Mach4 and have done for seven years, its light years ahead of Mach3 IMHO. Mach4 has six OB (Out of Band) axes, which can be jogged, and which still have a motor acceleration/deceleration
profile as part of the motor tuning. A continuous 'Velocity Jog' would give you a smoothly accelerating/decelerating spindle. Whether you can do the same in Mach3 is questionable.

Craig

725

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 09, 2022, 05:33:12 PM »

Hi,
well power output is not the big determinant, but smooth acceleration/deceleration is. I'm not at all sure that Mach3 applies an
acceleration/deceleration profile to its Step/Dir spindle.

Two possibilities to gain acceleration control.

If the spindle is a C axis, then it will have an acceleration/max velocity/deceleration profile per the Mach motor tuning page.

The second method relies on the servo itself. Lets say the Mach suddenly accelerates the spindle to max velocity by issuing an abrupt
stream of Step pulses, not ideal but I suspect its what might actually happen. The servo will not accelerate instantly but it will accelerate
at its maximum rate which is likely to be violent, and this is undesirable also.

I cannot speak for the little baby servo you have but the Delta servos I have, 750W's and 400W's, and Delta do 200W's and 100W's servos
in the same series, allow you to program the servo drive for the max acceleration/deceleration IRRESPECTIVE of what Mach tells it to do.
This means that the motor itself has a programmable acceleration/deceleration profile, and if I'm not mistaken the acceleration and deceleration
parameters are separate and so allow you to tailor the profile to your satisfaction.

Can you program such features into your servo?

Craig

726

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 08, 2022, 08:38:42 PM »

Hi,
even if the wee 130W servo doesn't have the power then get yourself a 750W Delta B2 series servo ($435USD) and it will 'kick anus all day long'.

Craig

727

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 08, 2022, 08:31:04 PM »

Hi,

Well those sewing machine motors run up to 5k rpm I think and can generate 3/4 hp, much more suitable than a 130W servo motor IMHO for a lathe.

On the basis of power output I'd have to agree. There are some countervailing arguments which may prove otherwise.

I've been using servos (Delta B2 series) for a year or more now and they never cease to amaze me how much power they produce, it seems rather more than the
nameplate would suggest. I think the feature that we overlook is a servos overload capacity, commonly three or four times its rated output. It would certainly not
work to design a system that required that overload capacity, but that capacity can and will be exploited and so make you believe that it has much more power
than you guess. On this basis I would suggest that this wee servo could well behave as if its a motor of 260W, so a little over 1/4 hp.

The second area that suggests a servo is better is because it can be position controlled. Things like rigid tapping become possible when you your spindle
has positional capability rather than just  a closed velocity loop.

I have a second hand 1.8kW Allen Bradley servo that I use as a secondary spindle motor. It has so much more torque than my regular 24000 rpm asynchronous
spindle, I use it for steel and stainless. Mostly I use it in velocity mode, ie just a free running spindle with a closed velocity loop, but I can and sometimes do use it
in position mode as a C axis which allows me to do rigid tapping. For instance:

g1 c3600 z-10 f10000
c0 z0

Will result in the C axis, ie the spindle, rotating 10 revolutions at a speed  of 10000 /360 = 27.8 rpm while the Z axis does a coordinated move of -10mm., ie a pitch
of 1mm per revolution. Then the C axis will stop, with deceleration, and coordinated with the Z axis, and then unwind ten revolutions with the Z axis coordinated
to back out of the thread at 1mm per revolution.

Note this does not require any specialised Gcode or any extra motion control support, it just relies on the coordinated movement of two axes which Mach does that and more all the time.

Craig

728

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 08, 2022, 04:44:50 PM »

Hi,
may I suggest a couple of experiments that will tell you if the ESS and servo are working as expected and also inform you as to how
to set up both to your satisfaction.

Start by assigning your servo to a rotary axis, say A or B , just as an experiment.

Lets say you have set the servo set to 2000 pulse per rev. A rotary axis has units of degrees, so the Steps per Unit value in the
A axis motor tuning page would be 2000 / 360 =5.55 Steps/unit. the max velocity in units would be 3000 (rpm) x 360 =1,080,000
units per minute, and make acceleration 10% of that, say 100,000 unit/s².

Now try an MDI command of
G0 A360000

This should cause the servo to rotate 1000 turns at max speed and acceleration then stop. Does it do so?

Craig

729

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 07, 2022, 10:25:40 PM »

Hi,
what I would do is just to prove that I can get the motor to turn....hook up the power and apply a 5V square wave from a signal generator to the Pul+ input with the Pul- input hooked to 0V com.

Craig

730

General Mach Discussion / Re: Looking for help with a spindle motor.

« on: April 07, 2022, 08:44:18 PM »

Hi,
well what is your set-up then? Have you tried cliking the drop down menu?

Craig