Messages

11

General Mach Discussion / Encoders not working on Xulifeng

« on: November 23, 2015, 07:57:32 PM »

I checked the quadrature signals on an oscilloscope and they are getting to the Xulifeng USB BOB just fine.  I connected X axis A and B channels to input pins 2 and 3 of the BOB with pull-up resistors.  I enabled Mach3 encoder1 and put in pins 2 & 3.  With the USB BOB, I shouldn't need to put anything in the port fields.  I set counts/unit at 4000 just to get it going.  I can scale it properly after I get it working.

My understanding is that is all it should take.  When I move the X axis I get pulses on the input pins but no readout in the encoder field on the settings screen.  What am I missing?

12

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New people welcome !! Come in here and introduce your self!

« on: November 23, 2015, 07:12:43 PM »

I was noticing that as of this writing we have 2795 members and have only heard from a couple of hundred and an even smaller number of regular posters.

So if you are new around here please post and introduce your self.  You could give a little on your background, hobbies , how you ended up here, whatever!

This is a site to help with mach. There is a great talent pool here already but this is a community driven site and we would love to hear from the silent masses

So stand up and say hi!!

Thanks,

Chad

OK, here we go.  My name is Ron.  I'm a retired electrical engineer living in Michigan.  I build and shoot precision rifles both in competition and on the prairie dog fields.  After three years of building more and more accurate guns and inching my longest prairie dog kill out a few yards at a time each trip to Wyoming, I finally killed one at over a mile in May 2014.  Now I need to learn how to chamber my own rifle barrels to cut down on the cost of having to do so many.

I am a total newbie with CNC programming and machine tools, but I'm having a load of fun figuring it all out.  I bought a South Bend heavy 10 a couple of months ago and was right in the middle of rebuilding it when the Bridgeport came up for sale.  It is a 2 HP Series I CNC sold new in 1979 and I've had it about a month now.  It was retrofitted in the 90s with a Centroid CNC4, which was still working when I bought it.  It was missing the PLC that interfaced the manual spindle controls to the CNC4.  The jog buttons, feed override, program run and pause buttons were working because they interfaced directly to the CNC4.  I couldn't live with the old DOS system and having to type in programs one character at a time, so I started researching.  I bought a Xulifeng BOB and downloaded the Mach3 demo.  I have successfully interfaced the BOB to the Centroid stepper drives and I have the unit running on Mach3.  I got all the previously non-functioning manual controls working with a little help from this site.  The only thing I have not been able to figure out is how to get the encoders configured.  I will be seeking help with that in another post.