This is my first Post to any forum, I hope I am doing this right!

I am working on retrofitting a old Bostomatic 300 ( a 0.0002" machine!) with a Mach3 control. I have purchased the SS and am waiting for the delivery! I want to use the SS board on the machine for stepper control and Machine I/O (limit, home sw. drawbar prox, air psi, coolant on/off etc.) and the PoKeys55 in the operator station where the PC and Manual controls will be located.

I believe that the SS is set to port #1 in the mach3 port setup page and the Pokeys wants port #10 assigned to it.

With this said does anyone know if there are or may be any interfacing problems with this configuration? I have not purchased the PoKeys55 yet because I want to wait for any responces to this Post. The final goal is to have pots for FRO and Spindle Speed Override along with the normal Cycle Start/Stop, Overtravel Override, Feed Hold etc. I like the idea of having a single USB cable from the machine and Operator station going to the PC! This will save a lot of wire and noise problems and really simplify things!

Thanks in advance!

Victor

generalemail@woh.rr.com

I have the PoKeys in a pendant and use a SmoothStepper on a Bridgeport. There is a problem with the FRO but it is not due to the PoKeys, it is purely the SS and Mach. Firstly the SS handles the FRO at the moment and it doesnt work that great, I have in the last few days been testing a Plugin for Greg where he has put control of FRO back to Mach and this is mostly working well. It allows greater than 100% FRO now and the only problem is if the FRO is set below 10% it will cause the SS to run out of Data. Brian has found a bug in Mach and I will be testing the fix over the next few days so heres hopeing

Hood

Hi,

Victor:
I think You should put the SS in the nearest place with PC. USB has much greater frequency than Your Step/Dir signals, so USB can be very noise dependent.

I'm preparing almost same control setup, I mean operator panel with built in custom PC. I will put the SS into it, and put two LPT cables from panel to machine. I think this solution is much better.

Regards,
Piotr

Long parallel cables can cause problems as well. As the length of the cable increased the signals will interact with each other more and more. This has the effect of some signals being delayed slightly more than others. At fast pulse rates it can cause problems.

IMHO, it is better to keep the PC, SS, and drives in close proximity and extend the cables to the monitor, keyboard, etc. These are far less critical. Someone just posted a neat KVM extension that works over a single Ethernet cable on the Warp9 forum.

Hello.

I am new. I have a problem whit ss and pokeys 55, the Estop are all time active.
I dont external suply ss and pokeys, is it the problem?

Thanks