Laptop Problems.
I have converted a mill and a lathe using desktops, no problem. I am making a plasma cutter and portable would be good hence the laptop. I have an old dell inspiron 1000, stopped as much background stuff as I could and fitted a bidirectional PCMCIA parallel converter. Set up Mach3 assigned pins 2,3,4,5,Xdir,X step, Y dir, Y step and checked pulse trains, very flakey and pulses on direction pins??
Changed the windows power interface from ACPI to Standard PC. Pulses now good but still have the same step pulse train on both step and direction pins, tried changing pin numbers and disabling pins in Mach3 but no joy, pulses just stay on the same pins. Tried inputs to the PC, they work.
So two problems, no direction signals and rather annoyingly windows assigns a different device number to the parallel port on each startup so I have to enter this in Mach3 before I start. Any ideas anyone. ( I know, use a desktop)!!