For, well, forever, I've had problems with my machine doing weird and unpredictable things from time to time. Lately, for whatever reason, it's been much worse, and has really been driving me crazy. Here's the kind of stuff I'd see:
1) At random, one axis would stop jogging. Jogging any other axis would get the "dead" one to come back to life
2) MDI would sometimes stop working
3) Occasionally, the machine would make un-commanded moves, or turn the spindle on, or off, by itself.
4) It would sometimes simply stop in the middle of a program run, as though someone had hit FeedHold
5) More often, the machine would refuse to make a move, by jogging, MDI or a macro, then spontaneously do it at a later time!
6) Jogging in continuous jog mode would sometimes give VERY jerky motion
7) A few times, I would command a probe in one axis, but the machine would actually probe in a different axis, or even multiple axes!
It would sometimes ignore SingleBlock, and run the program normally WHILE SingleBlock was still lit
9) Yesterday was the weirdest one of all - I tried to edit a button script, and within the VB editor window, if I selected some text, instead of the text being selected, the Z axis would go through a 1-2 second sequence of moves. This was absolutely repeatable!
And more...
I've suspected for several days the problem was somehow related to macros not running correctly, and somehow getting buffered up within Mach3. When I saw that last one, it became crystal clear that there was something really wrong within Mach3 itself, so I contacted Brian, with the result that he quickly found a serious problem in Mach3, related to the button code. In his words: "the base Button code was never meant to be able to handle Macros". He found some thread un-safe code in there, but he's now corrected the problem, and sent me a test build to try out, which I will be doing today. This could explain a LOT of the problems I've had over the years.
I'll report back after testing. This could be a major step forward in making macros more stable and predictable.
Regards,
Ray L.