Messages

7331

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 06, 2016, 10:26:00 PM »

Hi Hood,
the only real problem I've had is trying to get the SmoothStepper to run. The Warp9 setup utility for whatever reason did not work
and so I had to do it manually. I don't know s....t (that's 'squat' I assure you..) about computer networking.

I persevered and got there on the back of forum support, both professional and private.

Craig

7332

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 06, 2016, 09:03:26 PM »

Hi All,
another update...SUCCESS!!!

Turns out to be faulty firewall settings. I didn't have notification active and consequently didn't know that the
firewall was blocking ops.

All in all I've had great support from Andy and Jeff at Warp9, our very own Smurph and interest and suggestions from you guys. Makes a huge
difference when on several occasions I've wanted to throw the whole bloody lot out the window!

On to the next issue....probing.

Craig

7333

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 06, 2016, 04:50:10 AM »

Hi All,
bit of an update. Been getting really good support from Andy at Warp9 and based on his input and my own research I can now ping
the ESS from the Atom.

Still can't run M4/ESS, my guess at the moment is lack of bandwidth but still working on that....

Craig

7334

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 not going to speed I set in Cam program

« on: December 06, 2016, 02:06:18 AM »

Hi,
firstly can your machine do 600ipm. It can go only as fast as you set in the motor tuning page.
In addition the kernel seed may limit the speed you can go.

Lets say you steps/inch are 4000.
600 ipm is equivalent to 10 IPsec, 10x4000=40,000 pulses per sec. If your kernel speed is 25,000 per sec
the your out of luck, you cannot produce enuf pulses in a given time to drive the axis that fast.

Another issue is with co-ordinated motion, if you have one axis which is slow, a motor or driver limitation say, then
Mach will reduce the speed of the other axes to match the slow one if its incorporated in the move.

One last point is to make sure that federate/ rapidrate Overide is not in effect, I've overlooked that before!

Craig

7335

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Restart required to edit scripts

« on: December 05, 2016, 04:19:57 PM »

Hi DTG,
yes I've found exactly that, if M4 does not shutdown cleanly it wont restart. Its not always obvious that a shutdown fault
has occurred.

One small issue I found was this statement:
--mc.mcCntlEnable(inst, false);
which is in M400 in uncommented form in commented out in M41 in my macro.

It resulted in an enable instruction being thrown in the mix at the end of the probe Gcode job
and would return an error along the lines 'cannot end from MDI'. It was the error which tipped me off
to concentrating on the statement and determining the effect it has on operating flow.

Notwithstanding the issues I've mentioned when M4/ESS is running the motion is smooth and accurate.

Craig

7336

Mach4 General Discussion / Restart required to edit scripts

« on: December 05, 2016, 06:28:27 AM »

Hi All,
first day of cutting chips with M4/ESS. When it works it works very well indeed but having teething problems.

I have two scripts named M40 and M41 (to match M3 practice) which are probe-file-open and probe-file-close.
They are lightly edited versions of M400 and M401 that ship with M4 in Lua examples folder. To get the app
(Autoleveller) to read the file has been necessary to massage the format statement.

1)Fire up M4/ESS (with pendant in USB)
2)Reference axes
3)MDI to start and zero axes
4)Run the Gcode probing file.
5)Submit probe data to the app/ does it work?
6)If not edit script- PROBLEM, the browse window opens to show the scripts in my profile, choose the right one, click open
        but script editor does not open. Have to shut down M4 (remember to remove pendant before shutdown), restart M4
then the script editor will open. Have to re-reference, zero out etc. All quite tedious complicated by the fact that if the USB
pendant is active when I shut down it is necessary to depower the ESS before its recognised by M4.

Seems to me that there are two problems, the first is that depending on the sequence of events the USB pendant interferes with
the ESS establishing comms, a hardware conflict issue.
The second is what am I doing wrong that requires I restart M4 to get the script editor to open? If it opened on schedule the need
to sequence the shutdown disappears.

Craig

7337

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 05, 2016, 05:40:15 AM »

Hi DTG,
don't have a router at home, I have a Tstick which plugs into USB.

Will try to cobble something up over next few days.

Craig

7338

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 04, 2016, 02:59:00 PM »

Hi Mike,
that's a great idea.

What I know about networks I could write on the back of a envelope, a small envelope. The last couple of day I've trawled the net for
tutorials, videos, articles. Slowly building up the knowledge  and tools to tackle it.

Lets face it there are millions of Atom based netbooks and similar out there. They can't communicate via Ethernet....Rubbish!. It means I'm
doing something wrong, familiar ground for me.

I don't have at home any known good network capable devices. I might take it to work and while the boss is not looking plug it in and see what
happens. I need to test the onboard ports, there are two of them. Trying a known good port on a plugin card is a good idea along the same lines.
As is trying to establish a link between my own computers with a twisted pair cable. That relies on me correctly setting up the link and given
infancy in matters of networking failure could be me rather than the device at each end.

There may yet be a specific reason that the Atom can't communicate to the ESS, throughput, inability to sustain UDP or similar but I refuse
to believe that it can't manage TCP/IP.

CNC has been one long learning experience for me and so it continues.

Craig

7339

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Is somebody here who has expiriance with a mach4 handwheel

« on: December 04, 2016, 01:40:40 AM »

Hi beat,
I've just come inside from having wired up my machine to ESS, M4 and just loaded the M4 firmware and plugin
for my CncVista P1A pendant. I've had it for a few years on M3 and PP but can be upgraded to M4, painlessly no less!

Never used Velocity mode much with M3, just couldn't get the right 'feel'. Much, much better with M4 and it makes a real
groovy sort of sound when jogging, luv it!

Craig

7340

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mini ITX Motherboard for Mach4

« on: December 04, 2016, 01:28:15 AM »

Hi Mike,
M4 is not the problem, its establishing a UDP Ethernet link to the ESS.

Given that I had a cutdown OS I had hoped that a fullhouse OS would do the trick. I reformatted and installed
near the complete version of Windows Embedded Standard 7, which behaves almost identically to Windows 7 Personal.
It did not change the Ethernet situation tho. I have an oldish laptop installed from the same disc ie Windows Embedded 7
and it runs the ESS and M4 just fine.

At this stage I'm thinking that the Atom just wont run UDP Ethernet.

Still, its been a doozy little platform for M3 and PP, I was hoping to get some more use out of it.

Since the reformat the computer ID has changed so its copy of M4 is unlicensed as is the copy on the old laptop. I don't have
many to spare so am going to hang fire until I have a clear plan. My main 'inside' laptop is licensed and am using that on my mill.
Don't mind admitting that using a PC as cluttered as my laptop as a machine controller gives me chills after so assiduously
keeping the wee Atom so clean and lean.

Craig