Messages

91

General Mach Discussion / Re: Driver Test- Missing Vectors

« on: December 24, 2007, 08:51:36 PM »

Well, now my old computer is giving me the same kind of trouble the laptop was. I was trying to run a job drilling holes in some cast tool plate for the saddle on this mill. Redesigning it. Yesterday this thing was purring @ 300 IPM with no problem. A soon as I drilled the first hole, I noticed it lost steps. Luckily I stopped and investigated further. I jogged the axes and they sounded just as bad as they did with the laptop. Extremely rough. Ran a driver test and at first it ran and was very erratic with big ole spikes. The second time I got this missing vector error again. Soooo....

This computer is pretty old. It was fairly old when I installed it a couple years ago. It's a 1 ghz. AMD I think.
I had the pulsing up to 45,000 yesterday and was fine. It won't run on anything today. Several reboots as well. I even tried Quantum and got the same error message with it's driver test. This machine has been optimized and is running XP home. I wonder if it is the CPU or the ram that may be getting flakey?

Anyway, I had a P4 sitting next to it. It's about as stable as a drunk on a unicycle, but once it finally gets booted up and running Mach 3, it's fine. Nice smooth driver test. The mill started working fine with it. I think I am still just as confused as I was to start with.

92

General Mach Discussion / Re: Driver Test- Missing Vectors

« on: December 19, 2007, 03:41:23 PM »

I did all that as well, Hood. I got it to run the machine, but it runs it like crap. I really wanted to save some space with this as I didn't have room for a big monitor there....Yet. I hooked it back up to the older computer with the monitor sitting on a stool and the machine just purred. I guess I will just ignore laptops as a machine control source. This was my second attempt with a laptop. The other was a Toshiba satellite.
At any rate, I gues I'll be looking for a little LCD.
Thanks again.

93

General Mach Discussion / Re: Driver Test- Missing Vectors

« on: December 19, 2007, 12:29:38 PM »

Thanks Hood.
I did optomize it and tried it again. It didn't help it any. One part of the Opto file that I could not implement was the Optomize in registry portion.
It was telling me the file that I saved in notepad needed to be binary. It would not let me load it. Notepad didn't have a save as item that was labeled binary. Anyone have that portion of the opto file in binary format?
I will run it in 25,000 freq mode until we can figure it all out. I had no trouble with 45,000 on a slower computer. This is a laptop though. Different animal.

94

General Mach Discussion / Driver Test- Missing Vectors

« on: December 19, 2007, 07:48:39 AM »

Trying to setup my Thinkpad to run my newly built mill. It's an R40. 2 GHz with 512 MB ram.
The driver test works fine in 25,000 freq mode, but when I try the 35,000, I get an error that reads "Could not locate missing Vectors."
The next time I try the driver test, it runs on 25,000 frequency.
I tried the special driver with the same results.
Will I be forced to just use the 25,000 freq mode? Is the cpu too slow to go any faster? I did a few searches and saw this a couple times, but the questions on those threads were left unanswered. Anyone have any ideas.
It won't be the worst thing to run it slower for the mill, but just really curious about it.
Thanks a bunch.

95

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motor thunking?

« on: November 21, 2007, 01:04:48 PM »

You nailed it, Brett. It was indeed the keyboard. Thanks a bunch.

96

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motor thunking?

« on: November 21, 2007, 08:27:42 AM »

Thanks, Brett. That is something I would not have thought of. I have another flexi that I use on my router. It seems to work okay. I did have some issue with this one when I use the adapter and plug in beside the mouse.  USB worked okay. I will try another keyboard.

97

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motor thunking?

« on: November 21, 2007, 08:00:19 AM »

Yes, I am positive it is in the motors. I removed all three. These are direct driving some ground ball screws. I am going to try to up my frequency to 35,000. It is kind of puzzling that all three started doing this at the same time. Swapping to the gecko's eliminated the drives. I have tried the active high/low settings. I have changed the two pulse US timing settings in motor tuning. I did cut out my first part on this yesterday and it came out perfect size. Clean cuts, but I think it could be even cleaner without the thunking. I am pretty sure is actually stopping in those points for an instant. Otherwise, how would it make noise?
Thanks so far. It seems like it should be an easy thing to figure out, just haven't run into this before.
Here are a couple images of the mill.
I have done a little more work to it. I added way covers and I am adding an aluminum tray to catch the coolant.
I pulled the chain drive off the front and installed the Y motor direct drive like the other two. I get very nice smooth action except for the thunking.

98

General Mach Discussion / Motor thunking?

« on: November 20, 2007, 11:55:18 AM »

Hey Guys. I have a question. I have some standard 270 oz steppers that are thunking on nearly every single or two rotations. Not loosing steps I don't think, but this is a new occurrence.
I had them hooked up to a Xylotex 3 axis drive. These were previously working fine on my router with this setup. No thunking then.
I swapped the drives for 3 203V gecko's and tuned them and they still do this. I am only using a 28 volt PS. That is the same one that was always on here.
I tried a few settings in Mach 3, but still having the issue. I have a fairly recent (within the last two months) version of Mach 3 installed.
Any ideas?
Thanks a bunch.

99

General Mach Discussion / Re: How can I figure out my PC's max pulse rate?...

« on: July 01, 2007, 08:59:24 AM »

That makes sense. Perhaps that is why I haven't noticed this for the frequency.
Any idea why emergency pin settings don't stick? To be more precise, not only do the pin numbers not always save on the Estop, but once you click an estop as active in the settings, you can't save it as turned off. Rather I wasn't able to.

100

General Mach Discussion / Re: How can I figure out my PC's max pulse rate?...

« on: June 30, 2007, 03:24:26 PM »

I have seen it not saving a lot of different things lately. Not saving the emergency stop pin settings and so forth.
I wonder myself what could be causing this.