Messages

291

General Mach Discussion / Re: Changing the Sensitivity of Limit Switches?

« on: February 09, 2008, 05:12:07 PM »

Wood! excellent. but how do you maintain tolerances when the weather changes? Or doesn't  it matter too much?

292

General Mach Discussion / Re: Changing the Sensitivity of Limit Switches?

« on: February 08, 2008, 04:12:23 AM »

Solder or clamp those connections! If they use blade terminals you could use corresponding crimp connectors, that would work well.

The other thing is, your machine sounds fairly new so this probably won't be an issue but large old machines like mine often suffer from earth leakage from old wires, splashy coolant etc. I've got all my limits relayed to counteract this - they need a good current of 30mA or so to operate. It takes very little current to drag a port pin down to logic 0, earth leakage or fortuitous contact with earthed parts will easily do this.

293

General Mach Discussion / Re: Placing the Encoder - On ballscrew vs On motor

« on: February 05, 2008, 07:11:08 PM »

^^  What he said. I've seen timing belts routinely used on high-end military antenna positioners for their effectiveness alone... trust me, the price doesn't come into it. The better ones have steel strands to prevent stretching.

294

General Mach Discussion / Re: Manual limit override

« on: February 05, 2008, 07:06:30 PM »

this happens to me when a limit is actually hit - have you checked with Diagnostics to make sure that your limit switches are set up and operating correctly?

295

General Mach Discussion / Re: PCI port card addressing woes

« on: February 05, 2008, 04:06:57 PM »

No Iomegaware here, I fitted the box up from a bare disk. The new port card works fine anyway, and since i saw sense enough to put all the limits on one pin and the homes on another it's got an awful lot of spare capacity. I've got to re-do the interface board since the one i have is completely the wrong shape now, this way I can leave a block of spare outputs for a couple of extra steppers for future improvements, rotary table etc.

My new card uses IRQ sharing and this doesn't seen to raise any gremlins - it's an Abit motherboard btw, if that helps.

296

General Mach Discussion / Re: PCI port card addressing woes

« on: February 04, 2008, 06:58:01 AM »

Q? Did you hook up your lp2 card to a device first?

A - No, just fitted it and installed the drivers.

Q. Is your enable plug and play device checked on?

A - Yes.

Q.  Did you manually set your card to lpt2? mine comes up as lpt3, but i change it.

A - mine came up as LPT2 anyway, but this can be changed - I don't think this matters as mach3 cannot be ordered to look for an LPT number, just a hex address..

Q.  My lowest hexidecimal address is in the programs, acc, sys tool, sys info, hardware, i/O area: And it is E080-E08f. but in device manager it says ec00. Is my card not compatible??

A - Try both. The address Device manager gave me worked first time. I tested the card out by setting mach3 to autodetect a signal for X++ (ports& pins - inputs - automatically detect inputs) which is lazy but effective as it will pick up anything it sees changing. Or, to eliminate hardware gripes, pop a 300 ohm resistor between pin 10 and pin 25 with autodetect on - this should give you a result.

Q. Have you tried the   other cards you purchased? ty for the help.

A - np yes, tried them, they are identical to the one i tried last week and they work perfectly.

Good luck with this one - Whether or not the card is good, let us know and tell us what chipset it uses so we can get it on record. photos if possible

297

General Mach Discussion / Re: 2nd parallel port pin (2-9) as inputs

« on: February 02, 2008, 08:39:24 PM »

What card, with which chipset are you using?

298

General Mach Discussion / Re: Hooking up limits!

« on: February 01, 2008, 04:46:38 AM »

Without seeing your wiring, I couldn't confirm that exactly - but my method uses a fairly strong current (30mA or so) to hold a relay shut in the isolating board, shorting a pin to LPT ground. Hitting a limit forces a switch open and allows the relay to power down and snap open for an "active high" input. This has three benefits for me - as mentioned, basic wiring supervision; faults are detected and flagged. Second, earth leakage is allowed for; there's quite a bit on my rig being both large and old. Third - the relays give me around 1500V worth of isolation going into the port, so bangs and flashes won't breed further down the line

299

General Mach Discussion / Re: PCI port card addressing woes

« on: February 01, 2008, 04:34:59 AM »

http://www.moschip.com/html/download_drivers.html

A lot of the I/O cards use the same driver package - As to exactly which drivers are installed i'm not sure. i just unpacked the .ZIP file to a flash drive and aimed the windows installer at it; off it toddled and installed the card. The port address was taken from Device Manager - just look up LPT2, properties, resources, and there's a box showing several hexidecimal input/output ranges , ie

18F - 194
244-24D
455 - 48A

Copy the first, lowest address from this list (18F for this one, yours will be different) and pop it in Mach3's port address for LPT2, then click Apply. I note with some displeasure that changing the address does not by itself enable the apply button - to do this, uncheck and recheck the "enable port 2" tickbox, then click Apply as usual.

As to this business with some parallell cards not displaying a Resources tab ... I'm not sure but they may use some sort of emulation to allow printing but very little else. I think all told they're not worth the bother and should be avoided, I was looking for a proper address for mine in the depths of the registry and all sorts of other unholy places, it wasn't there.

Is there/should we start a thread solely devoted to cards or chipsets that we know behave themselves well with mach3?

300

General Mach Discussion / Re: PCI port card addressing woes

« on: January 31, 2008, 04:43:53 PM »

i'm usiing  xp pro, i won't touch vista with a bargepole especially anything relying on low-level or time critical operations. now, i haven't used a 9735 chipset but i imagine it should perform pretty much the same as the one i was using, in xp at least.  if vista doesn't handle physical addressing in the same way as xp then you may be a bit stuck - there is a whole forum on vista compatibility. i won't be reading it until somebody not from redmond says anything nice about vista which doesn't involve desktop effects.

for my next trick i'm going to have to build a charge-pump safety board, since the lpt makes the relays snap on and off when the computer wakes up and coughs, and i don't want the spindle jumping about and the coolant jizzing all over, etc.