Messages

31

General Mach Discussion / Mach3 and mill set up

« on: March 20, 2006, 12:22:18 PM »

Is there a "correct" process for setting up Mach3 with a mill in respect of table travel direction?

Initially I set my table travel directions to match the arrow keys on the computer e.g. arrow left pointing table travels to the left.
This was done with the default settings in Mach3 and the hard wiring to the motors. The only difference is that my motor drivers require the ouput pulse to be "active low" to get them working so the pulses are effectively inverted from waht is normal I believe.

When I did a Reference all home the tables travelled in the wrong direction so I used "reverse" in Mach 3 to corrrect that and the tables did their refereance home OK.

Now the tables travel opposite to the arrows of course.

The interesting point to me is that when observing the cross hairs they move in the same direction as the arrow keys but opposit to the table movemnt. So the spatial awarnes is that the cross hairs represent the tool travelling to the work rather than the work travelling to the tool.

Would this all come about through an inverted pulse to the motor drivers?

32

General Mach Discussion / Backlash compensation

« on: March 16, 2006, 04:26:08 PM »

I notice in the Mach3 manual that backlash compensation is said to be only useful for drilling and turning where the operation can be approached from the same direction.

Why cannot backlash compensation be designed that compensates for the reversing of the lead screw when in continuous cutting? 

33

General Mach Discussion / Re: Laptop Driver problem

« on: March 15, 2006, 01:06:43 PM »

If your problem has any similarity to mine then it may be because your laptop is polling a port persistantly because it expects something to be plugged into it even though the application that uses the port may not be running. In my case it was the floppy drive being plugged into a USB port that solved my problem even though the drive was not in use.

So if you had any applications that used a USB port then try plugging them in, nothing else just plug it in ....

Alan

34

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 driver problem

« on: March 14, 2006, 12:39:34 PM »

Here's an update ...... I thought the driver may have become corrupted somehow and reloaded the Pulser.ico file. First time I ran the driver terst it was OK the second time and subsequent times it was not.

My floppy drive is an external device via a USB port. and moving the laptop to and from the workshop the drive was disconnected. By chance I put the drive back in after the a failed test and behold the test was OK. I found that if during the test I unplugeed and plugged the disc drive the timings went haywire with the drive unplugged and OK when plugged back in.

Why the problem came to light was because I had not plugged the floppy disc drive in as I did not need the tap files that were on it. I did not consider for a moment that such an action was the cause of the mill not working.

Now Mach3 automatically looks at my floppy drive when I go to load a G code file and I suppose that as the drive was not there even though I was not loading any G code file Mach 3 expected the drive to be there and was continually poliing to find the drive and mucking up the timing ..... is this the likely cause? any experts likey to know please.

35

General Mach Discussion / Mach3 driver problem

« on: March 14, 2006, 09:54:49 AM »

My Mach3 driver has been working ...... until now, when for no reason its has started to go all over the place according to the driver test. There have been no external changes to the breakout board or motor driver controls and no changes to the computer configuration or software. Now the motors will not drive properly of course.

Is there any info on what may have caused this failure?

Could it be a hardware failure in the PC (Laptop)? On occasions the Mach3 test screen will show the CPU speed lower than it should be. However there seems to be no correlation between this and the horrible waveform that is occuring even when the CPU speed indicates at the corret value.