Hi guys,

I just thought I'd post my experience sorting out my USB Smoothstepper. I had all the usual FT_IO_ERROR issues, and trawled through all the posts here, and as well as talking with Greg got the issue resolved and my system's running smooth as silk.

Here's my setup -

Windows 2000 pro server, SP3, Pentium III 450mhz CPU, 768mb RAM (yes, I know, it's a dinosaur but it's an old database server I had and it's built like a tank and very reliable).
Mach3 Licensed version R3.043.066
Gecko G540 motor driver
CHinese Huanyang VFD, 1.5kw spindle, liquid cooled,  driven from Mach3 using  the USB - RS485 plugin developed by Seb
(here's the link http://royaumedeole.fr/informatique/plugin-mach3-pour-vfdhuanyang/mach3-plugin-for-huanyang-vfd/)
USB driver for SS is 2.08.24
Mach 3 plugin is V17F.

The USB SS board itself is mounted on electrically isolated stand offs in a new enclosure I'm building to clean up the connections for the home and limit switches and house the independent power supplies for the coolant pump and heat exchanger fan for the spindle. The SS board is currently running of power from the USB cable from the server. The cable itself has a ferrite noise filter.

The router bed itself is a modified Joes Hybrid, dual drives on the Y axis (A slaved to the Y) bed measures 800 x 1200.

The reason I upgraded was the best feed rates I could get before the motion started getting jerky and missing steps was no more than 500mm/min, and much less on curves, even with the CV settings in Mach 3 adjusted.

First install, following the install and users guide , on the first time Mach 3 fires up, selected the default options for the SS plugin and restarted Mach 3. Immediately started hetting FT_IO_ERRORS and "watchdog timeouts exceeded - if persists, contact support". As mentioned in some of the posts here, I increased the watchdog timeout to the max of 3.1 but with no success. Got in touch with Greg, he suggested deinstalling the drivers and reinstalling, as well as trying new versions of the USB drier and Mach 3 plugin (Mach 3 plugin V17FE and USB driver 2.08.30), again with no success.

After another trawl through the forum here, it was becoming more apparent that the problem was noise related - the USB SS appears to be susceptible to noise, and looks like the possible (probable?) cause of a lot of these issues. Even though the PC, Gecko power supply and the VFD for the spindle are all going through a common earth, I ran an earthing strap between the PC case and the Gecko power supply case, and then set the Mach3 debounce setting to 750 and the plugin filter settings to 10 and the problem disappeared. So now I'm getting a good clean signal via the USB cable to the SS board, and the motion on the router is smooth as silk. I'm still experimenting with the motor tuning, but I'm getting rapids of around 2200 - 2500 mm/min with no lost steps.

All my motor, home and limit switch cables are dual core shielded, and the power cable to the spindle is shielded. I've set up a movable gantry above the table to carry the spindle cable, vacuum hose for the dust collector and air line for the mist cooler so that moves the spindle cable away from the motor, home and limit cables. Even though the system is working fine at the moment, I'm going to install an independent, regulated 5v external power supply for the SS board, and put ferrite filters on the rest of the cables. Maybe overkill, but I'd rather do a bit more work to ensure the systems reliability.


So far, very happy with the results - like I said, it took a little while, but the end result was certainly worth the effort.

Cheers

Geoff