Messages

51

General Mach Discussion / Re: Home Limit Switch problems Mach3 with HobbyCNC Pro

« on: October 21, 2007, 07:43:09 AM »

Hey Martin, I went back and searched my old posts on another forum from where I was having the problem, note that 5v is all that is neccessary to change the state of the input:

H-CNC board is chopper drive, &
stepper motors are obviously pulse drive. Noisy, trashy stuff. I
included my limit switch wires in the same cable with the motors. I
put my scope on the limit swith leads at the controller board and I
found 3 Vpp of noise on the switch lines.
I put a .01 cap from the lines to ground and viola, noise was gone
and the home switchs worked as designed. I suspect shieled cable for
the home switches would be in order but I'd still use a cap across
any & all of the I/O lines to reduce the chance of a spike tripping
things.

52

General Mach Discussion / Re: Home Limit Switch problems Mach3 with HobbyCNC Pro

« on: October 20, 2007, 10:45:09 AM »

I run the same controller and had the same problem made worse by the fact that I shared the motor cable with the limit switches. You need to add some capacitors to the inputs at the control board between eash switch line & ground. I 'think' I used .1 or .01 caps on mine. It solved the problem with the induced noise on the lines and all is well.

53

General Mach Discussion / 4th Axis feed problem, need to increase feed rate

« on: October 20, 2007, 07:53:30 AM »

I'm still running Mach 2 as my laptop doesn't have the capacity for Mach 3. That being said, what I have done is substituted the A axis for the Y axis in my code simply by doing a search & replace with a text editor. I believe I can accomplish the same in Mach by slaving an axis but haven't read the manual on that. Anyway, the problem I'm faced with is the mechanical difference between the A axis and the XY axis's results in a substancial feed feed rate difference. I need to determine a way to make the actual feed rate the same for  the A axis as it is for the others. Suggestions?

54

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need some engraving motor advice

« on: June 23, 2007, 12:01:36 PM »

On my spindle, it's pretty loud. Louder than a Dremmel but mine has a 9 volt motor. He has some now that are improved with a 110V motor. Good stuff though, beter than an air motor. I tached mine at 22,000 RPM.

55

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need some engraving motor advice

« on: June 22, 2007, 10:23:26 AM »

Scott, I use a spindle made by Wolfgang Engineering, he sells on ebay, his user name is wolfgang314 if you do the ebay search for his products, he will come up. Great product at a great price. I make my own engraving points using .125" carbide blanks, I grind them on my faceting machine. There are other commercial supplieres of engraving points, Travers carries them, you can also get them from www.2linc.com. I use OneCNC for my engraving work.

--Chuck

56

General Mach Discussion / Re: Heelllllp!!!!!!!

« on: March 17, 2007, 08:58:48 PM »

My win.ini has even less than that.

I did install an upgrade to my CAD/CAM software and the post processor changed. It may be something in my Post, it seems this line: S4500 F5 M3 M07 causes a problem if I memo it out, it seems to cure the problem. Gonna read the Mach manual and see where the error might be.

57

General Mach Discussion / Re: Heelllllp!!!!!!!

« on: March 17, 2007, 05:07:49 PM »

I've isolated the problem to the win.ini file by using msconfig to selectivly load everything. If I don't load the win.ini file, things appear to work normally. How can I figure out what causing the problem in the win.ini file?

BTW I had done a system restore when I first encountered the problem and it had no effect.

58

General Mach Discussion / Heelllllp!!!!!!!

« on: March 17, 2007, 04:26:57 PM »

I'm running Mach2 latest version. Went to run a job today, everything was fine until I hit the Esc key or if i Clicked the Stop button. The Machine stopped and Mach locked up. Clicking on Stop again generated the Win Error & it of course wants to email it and close. THis computer isn't on any network or coneected by modem and it's dedicated to the machine. Not used for anything else, no other siftware installed. SP2 service pack, but no other regular updates, plain jane simple.

The only thing that I did that I can think that caused the problem is I carried my CNC code to the computer on my USB drive. My USB drive had a network key loaded on it for our Zyxel wireless Router that autoloads itself. File name is   setupSNK.exe, it's genereated by Windows when you are setting up a wireless network, and you carry your USB drive to the various machines that you want to activate. Anyway, this computer has no network hardware, nothing in the Control panel indicating a network. No indication  when I plugged in the USB drive that something was loading etc. Dunno if that has caused the problem or not but it's the only thing that I can possibly think of.

I Reloaded Mach2 in a new directory, & set it up again but it made no difference. I've got a ton of work to do, and while I can run the jobs, if I have to stop in the middle of one, I'm toast. Definately some kind of Windows problem but I don't know what. All looks normal in the System menu. HELP!!!!!

59

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach2/3 Hardware requirements?

« on: August 13, 2006, 09:20:02 AM »

Dave, don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Just run Mach2 like I'm doing. the license is good for either so if you happen across another laptop, you can move up.

Mach2 runs great on the 400mHz HP that I have, paid $150 delivered for it. I've got a used Compaq 2gHz I paid $350 and it was such a nice laptop and a step up for me, I couldn't sacrafice it to the garage.

Mach2 is pretty well debugged so that is to your advantage as well. A big step up for me over TurboCNC

Bummer,
I just checked my computer and it's actually a Pentium 3 running at 600MHz, so I guess that won't do!
I already have two computers and don't fancy spending on another! Looks like Mach software is out of the running then.

Cheers,
Dave.

Art told me in an email that Mach 3 really needs a minimum of 1gHz CPU.

60

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach2/3 Hardware requirements?

« on: August 11, 2006, 09:08:19 AM »

Art told me in an email that Mach 3 really needs a minimum of 1gHz CPU.