This morming I decided to finally get off my lazy butt and ressurrect my old X2 CNC, to use for drilling and tapping. I grabbed the old E-box off that was on my knee mill until a couple of weeks ago, and the old PC that was running the knee mill until a couple of months ago, installed some G201s, and connected everything up. After re-configuring Mach, and installing the same version I've been using for months (3.042.020), it's working. Well, sorta.... kinda.... The Z axis works fine, nice and smooth and fast. But X and Y are *really* ragged, and very slow. Funny thing is, they're all running on the same parallel port! I looked at the pulse timing on Z, and the pulses are nice and consistent, and pretty evenly spaced. On X and Y, they're all over the place! How can that be?
I ran DriverTest, and, despite the fact that this is a lowly 540MHz machine, DriverTest says it's excellent, even at 45kHz, though I'm only running 25kHz. I ran this machine for years on both the X2 and then the knee mill, and it always performed very well, and I never had a single problem that was positively pinned on the low CPU speed (though it is a dual CPU machine).
I also tried moving to a different printer port (I have 3), and they were no better.
So, how can I get good pulsing on Z, and lousy pulsing on X and Y??
Regards,
Ray L.