Hi All,
I am in the process of installing CNC on my HBM20 mill and I (finally) nrezsolved a problem last night, the solution for which may aid others.
My PC was bought on eBay (51€!) with a 1.7 GHZ AMD processor and 1GB of RAM. The original machine had XP loaded but also a lot of other video and media hard and software. Consequently I restarted with a clean disk and a clean install of XP. Initially this would not allow a stable operation of the test program, usually masses of lines followed swiftly by a complete lock up requiring a power off restart.
I resolved this by applying all of the solutions in the optimisation document along with a complete reload of XP. This cured the stability problems and also gave me a near perfect result from the test.
Fine.
Then I attached my breakout board (supplied unbuilt from Marcus electronics in Germany - I am a former electronics engineer so building this was not a major effort) and decided to check the outputs before attaching motors etc.
I found no signals at the stepper driver end, nor any signals coming out of the parallel port. The lines were observed with a combination of normal and storage scopes.
To cut a long and tedious story short, I eventually looked in the BIOS setup and discovered that the parallel port was set for EPP+HPP (I think...) and that there was an option for 'standard'. Changing this and a further reboot resulted in signals all over the place exactly when I wanted them.
I have not seen this issue mentioned anywhere else, perhaps I didn't look hard enough though!
BTW, when looking for signals, I didn't use the jog controls but just set a G0 to say +200 so that I had a constant stream of pulses, allowing me to use both hands for hunting down the signals.
Regards
Simon.