Thanks Dave, its a small machine and it needs to be compact,  I am not used to that

Dan
Step/Velocity mode has never worked since the day it was introduced as far as I am aware. I use Velocity and Multistep modes and quite like them. I have no need for accurate steps when in Velocity mode as I simply use it for jogging, turn fast it moves fast, slow its goes slow. When I want to sneak up on an edge I change to 0.01mm multistep mode and its perfect.
Not sure how I will get on with the MPG working this way as I dont think I will be able to get full rapid speed with the MPG and I am used to that.
On the scorpion I convert the MPG to 24v and use normal inputs, if I feel the need I could do the same with this controller I would imagine.
Time wil tell.

I found a pot last night and hooked it to one of the analogue inputs and it worked well. It seems to be filtered so that it steps in 5% increments but the one thing that wasnt quite so great was when at zero it did not stop motion fully. This used to happen with Mach when using Mach to do the actual overrides but Brian sorted that for me a while ago so maybe they can adapt the plugin to do the same. Its not a huge deal but I have got used to setting the FRO pot to zero and it not moving at all until I wind back up again.
Hood

Hooked up a servo motor/drive to test out the spindle control.
Had some weird problems at first such as having to tell the CSMIO that the encoder counts were double of what they were and also tell the drive the rpm/v were double. It turned out to be the drive that was not right for some reason as when I commanded a 1000rpm the CSMIO analogue output was measured at 2v and when I looked in the drive it also agreed that the command input was 2000mV yet the rpm/v was set at 1000 so in reality the motor should have been doing 2000rpm instead of the 1000 it was doing. I shut the drive down and restarted and this time things worked correctly and I had to set the encoder back to its correct ppr in the CSMIO config and also the rpm/volt to 500 in the drive.
 So after getting that sorted things worked well, the speed seems linear and fairly accurate although there is a difference of 10 to 15 rpm from what the drive reports and what the CSMIO reports. This may or may not be an issue when threading, time will tell.
 One other thing I found out is the Encoder input on the CSMIO-Enc module seems to be limited in frequency, if I asked for a spindle speed that took the pulses too high then the RPM would not display correctly, it seems to be around the 300KHz mark that it is limited to reading. To test I divided the drives buffered encoder outputs from my drive by 4 and all worked well.
 I have also changed the port from being the feed override to the spindle override in the CSMIO config and it works very well with nice smooth transitions in speed control so that is looking good as well.

Hood

I think I missed something. Aren't you using the Ultra3000's? Why analogue? And isn't it the CSMIO/IP-A which is the analogue controller?

Dan

Dan,
 the CSMIO-IP/S is the one I have but the only method of spindle control at the moment is Analogue 0-10v.
I am hoping they will allow an unused axis to be configured as a step/dir spindle in the future but at this moment in time its not an option.
Bit of a shame really, as although I dont know about writing  plugins, I wouldnt imagine it would be too difficult, well thats what everyone says when they dont know whats involved

Hood

Ah... that's a shame. Somehow I missed that part.

Dan

Was testing out the threading in simulation to see what it looked like but kept getting Resets whenever it came to the threading code. Couldnt understand as I had previously run some code from Mach that seemed to work.  After a while the penny dropped, I had M4 for my code but the previous Mach code had M3. I changed my code to have a M3 in it and it ran fine so that was definitely the issue. That forced me to make up a relay board to invert the 0-10v analogue output from the CSMIO so that my spindle would actually reverse and sure enough the code ran fine whether there was a M3 or M4.
 There still seems to be the delay in pullout at the end of the thread but it did seem faster sometimes more than others, suppose it will only be on a part that I will know for sure if its ok or not.
 I also thought I would disable the servo drive so I could rotate the motor by hand and that way the CSMIO would see the encoder and  hopefully thread. It seemed to track very  well even though the revs were jumping around all over the place but again only cutting a real part would let me know for sure how good it was tracking.
 One last thing I did was use the spindle override whilst a thread was being done and again the Z seemed to track the rotations nicely.
Hood

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one taking my time getting a fully functional machine.

I finally finished the gang tooled collet holder for mine today.
Made the collet holders from some silver steel I had lying around and I'm surprised how well the standard motors handled the threading (vid here if you want to waste a minute or so!).

I'm interested to see how your's handles all the upgrades you've done. I doubt I'll do anything but running repairs to mine, as I could really do with something a bit bigger, although a bigger stepper on the Z would help with drilling...

Ha ha yes its taking a while but I put it on hold until I decided the way I was going to go.
What I am doing is way way way overkill for this wee lathe but it saves me putting the big lathe out of action while I test out the CSMIO control. if it works well then I will either buy another or put the one from this on the big lathe and the ESS on this.

Gang tooling looks good And the threading is excellent too
Is it the stock steppers and drives you are using?
Are you using the parallel port?
Hood

All the mechanics/motors are the original, however the original controls were dead to the world, so it now sports an original SS connected to a CNC4PC C23 with a couple Gecko 251s and a KBIC.

If I was to change anything, I'd swap the SS for a ESS, and use a PMDX board, however I already had the SS and C23.
I would like to add some extra functions via PoKeys, however I'm trying to resist spending anymore money on it until it's made me some!

Wow, mc your ER gang tooling attachment is great!  I couldn't tell from the pic, does it bolt down to the carriage or clamp in a QCTP?

I'm in the planning stages for a twin QCTP attachment for my little ORAC.  Could you take a few notes and post a "Tools & Offsets For Dummies" how-to thread when you start setting up Mach for yours?  Pretty-Please?