Messages

7421

General Mach Discussion / Re: Long programs crashing

« on: September 06, 2016, 03:14:02 AM »

Hi Rachie,
I did a bit of searching on the net when I was trying to get this to work and I came across
an article, one of those research paper types from a crew in Germany. Don't have a link
but might be able to find it again.

They were trying to develop machine/methods to wind unusal shapes without a lot of tooling
and so on.

What they did was have the bobbin fixed to the table and the winding head describe an appropriate
path around the periphery under CNC control with the wire exiting a little "L" shaped tube.
Great idea for motor winding and so on. They used a 'you beaut' industrial robot with three arms
varying under computer control. Such machines are capable of high (100's m/sec) and looked good.

I experimented with my 3 axis mill but even screwing everything to the max it would do a turn every
ten seconds or so. It was going to be very slow and as the coils I'm winding are so simple it didn't make
sense. I was impressed by the idea tho... and if I were winding something weird I would certainly go
back and revisit the idea.

Craig

7422

General Mach Discussion / Re: What drive to use with this motor?

« on: September 05, 2016, 08:35:57 AM »

Hi BoronNitirde,
do you know what sort of position feedback it has ie encoder or resolver?

I bought a 'you beaut' servo off eBay thinking to use it for a spindle. When it
turned up it's in beautiful maybe even new condition despite being made in the
mid 90's.

I thought I was going to be able to run it with a sensorless vector  VFD. It does
work but not nearly as well as I hoped or as it is capable of. I started looking for a
drive for it and came unstuck. This servo is fitted with an 8 pole resolver so choices are
limited and those that would work are way out of my budget.

I realise now that AC servos are quite a bit more reliable than the drives and consequently
come up second hand cheap but not so the drives.

I elected to make my own. A brave (read stupid) decision. I haven't bailed on it yet and
I've learnt a lot along the way but....

Craig

7423

General Mach Discussion / Re: Long programs crashing

« on: September 05, 2016, 08:17:03 AM »

Hi Rachie,
I recently wrote a script to wind coils and am interested in how you went about it.

In my case I wanted to wind 500 turns of 0.2mm wire in 5mmwide layers (25 turns)
and 20 layers. It works but needs more work to get it right.
I used an encoder (an old rotary potentiometer with the detent ball taken out) on the spindle.
The spindle is a 24Vdc brushed motor run at about 15V thru a 16Ohm resistor. In runs in
torque mode where I feed the wire by hand to regulate the speed that the spindle rotates.
Provided I don't let it spin to fast the encoder counts OK. I have Mach3 reading the encoder
and do a calculation to shift backwards and forwards to lay the turns down.
I enabled encoder4 in the config ports&pins. The raw count is OEMDRO(143) and I believe
the units count is OEMDRO(173). While I can read them (getOEMDRO(n)) I couldn't reset
either of them (setOEMDRO(n,0.0)). Don't really understand why.
I have since discovered another DRO that holds the corrected units value (OEMDRO(100)) and
this one I can reset. Additionally resetting DRO(100) 'forces' DRO(143) to reset also.

That's about the extent of what I've learnt about Mach3 encoder DRO's at present. Seems I have
more questions than answers at the moment.

I don't know for sure but I think DRO(143), the raw count, is stored as a long integer, ie 32bit
which means it can count up to billions. With my encoder at 96 count/rev it could count millions
of turns before it overflows.

My guess is if you are doing a similar thing that the error is not overflow but as Tweakie has suggested
noise on your Estop circuit.

Would luv to hear what your doing and how you're doing it.

Craig

7424

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M4 Licence Clarification

« on: September 05, 2016, 03:11:38 AM »

Hi Tweakie,
the syntax examples I've seen of Lua look very much like C/C++ data structures.
If that is the case then there is a learning curve but the versatility and robustness
of the result will be worth the effort.

Aside from anything else every sale of M4 allows the software guys to advance the product
and my estimate from the demo is that where M3 is great M4 is going to be #$#@ing amazing!

Craig

7425

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M4 Licence Clarification

« on: September 05, 2016, 02:51:56 AM »

Hi All,
just bought a licence for M4 and just to dip my toe in the water Darwin...

Craig

7426

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M4 Licence Clarification

« on: September 04, 2016, 02:23:12 PM »

Hi guys,
Kool!

Craig

7427

Mach4 General Discussion / M4 Licence Clarification

« on: September 04, 2016, 05:16:36 AM »

Hi All,
can someone clarify the M4Hobby licence situation.

From the Artsoft site I read and understand that a licence is issued to a uniquely
indentified machine.

One of the posts in this forum suggested that a max of five licences can be active.

What I really need to know is whether it is permissible to have two active copies,
one on my machine controller and another on my laptop for test/development
purposes but not actually running a machine?

Craig

7428

VB and the development of wizards / Re: Need a macro to change a file name.

« on: August 30, 2016, 06:34:07 AM »

Hi neilrlw,
I'm very new at this so it may not help....

This is part of a script I wrote to introduce a correction into a Gcode file.
Note I used a fixed path to a file in myDocuments. Then used a dialog box
to get the name of the specific Gcode file, opened it as input and created
a new file with 'CORRECTED' inserted in the original name as output.


pathname="C:\Users\craig\Documents\eagle\lvdt2\"
 Begin Dialog filenameinput 16,30,180,96,"filename input"
 OKButton 132,20,40,14
 Text 8,8,32,8,""
 TextBox 8,20,100,12,.inputname
 End Dialog
 Dim Dlg1 As filenameinput
 Dialog  Dlg1
origname=pathname & Dlg1.inputname
modname=pathname & "CORRECTED" & Dlg1.inputname

It might be a dirty trick but you could do similar

pathname="C:\.........(to your file directory of interest)"

Use a textbox to get the name of the specific file you want...
The complete filename would be...

origname=pathname&Dlg1.inputname              'inputname="circle.tap" for instance

and the modified filename could be....

modname=pathname & "MODIFIED" &Dlg1.inputname

Now open the original as input and the modified as output and copy line by line
until the end of the file...

Open origname For Input As #1
Open modname For Output As #2
While Not EOF(1)
Line Input #1, currline
Print #2,currline
Wend

As I say it is a cheap and dirty trick but it worked. There was of course a bit more code
within the body of the loop to effect the correction I needed to make but still it worked.

Craig

7429

VB and the development of wizards / Re: Mach3 doesn’t read some VB Script.

« on: August 29, 2016, 04:04:06 AM »

Hi Samrai,
agreed it is for debug use. The corrected DRO, that is to say the DRO in units is 173.
Unfortunately I couldn't set that either. Worse when I read it getOEMDRO(173) it returns
the value in units OK but reading it again some time later it has incremented as if it
had a velocity component despite setting the velocity correction coefficient to zero.

Causing me some frustration! Confusion and frustration seem to be part and parcel
of learning something new. If I let frustration cause me to say 'to hell with it!' and
chuck it in then I certainly won't learn anything new.

I have a workaround that works and allows me to do the job I set out to do so I
can afford to be a bit patient about the 'understanding' and ask questions and confer
with others like yourself.

Craig

7430

VB and the development of wizards / VB vs VBscript

« on: August 27, 2016, 05:26:43 PM »

Hi All,
I have successfully learnt to write some simple scripts using M3's built in script
editor. If I understand correctly such scripts are written using Cypress Enable.

Is it possible to run a VB program from within M3?

For example call an M code, say M100, and have M100 launch a Windows Form Application
which might include file dialogs and similar. If it is possible can the same M100 generate
Gcode by code " <content derived from VB app>"?

Craig