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Author Topic: Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,  (Read 2228 times)

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Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,
« on: July 20, 2014, 04:52:32 PM »
First off, I'm very new to CNC and though I've read up on a lot of the aspects of cnc I still have a lot of applicational skills to learn.

With that said, I'm stuck still trying to get my parallel port cable to show signs of signal transmission. I set everything up according to the manual that came with the red tb6560 board that I bought from sainsmart and no movement was seen. So I killed the power and hooked up my multimeter to measure my voltage drop across the pins of the parallel port cable. I measured these pins with mach3 open and estop reset button not blinking. Here is what I read, (pin# - voltage)

1-3.3v 2-0v 3-0v 4-3.3v 5-0v 6-0v 7-0v 8-0v 9-0v 10-4v 11-4v 12-4v 13-4v 14-3.3v 15-4v 16-3.3v 17-0v 18-0v 19-0v 20-0v 21-0v 22-0v 23-0v 24-0v 25-ground

Seems to me the pin 3 should have went from 0-3.3V as I moved the x axis, but nothing. So I looked into my device manager for the port name, and the only LTP was 378 and mach had that selected already. The other port was COM1. I thought it was my board, since I've heard a lot of bad things about these drivers, but I can't even make smoke, vibrations in the motors, nothing!

The PC I'm using is a dell GX 620 with win 7 32bit os. Please help me from going crazy by measuring voltages of my parallel port pins repeatedly lol!

Offline Hood

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Re: Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,
« Reply #1 on: July 21, 2014, 06:30:30 PM »
Can you attach your xml please, it will allow me to see what pins you have set up.
Hood
Re: Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2014, 08:35:25 PM »
Hood,

This is embarrassing but I'm not even sure where to pull the XML file your referencing. From reading a few posts I can see its a file of my configurations in mach, but as to creating it I'm still learning. The good news is that after uninstalling and reinstalling mach I have movement! Matter of fact everything is running great! Now I'm dealing with how to tune the steppers. They hiss a bit with fast decay and full or 1/2 step settings but at 1/8 microstep and slow current decay not too bad. I just can't figure out how to make them start up more smoothly, they jerk from 0%-50% speed then smooth out at full speed. Is this normal?

Also, at full speed they have very small jitters maybe 3-5 blips per 2-3 seconds. Not sure if this means lost steps yet as I'm still watching the tape spin on the motor shafts. But after spending 8+ hours debugging I'm happy happy happy to see motion.

Can you give me a hint as to where I can copy this XML? Thanks for your patience!

Offline Hood

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Re: Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,
« Reply #3 on: July 22, 2014, 02:41:29 PM »
If you have Mach open you will  see the profile name lower right, close Mach then look in the main Mach3 folder for a file of that name with a .xml file extension. Copy it to  your desktop and rename to something unique such as CadJunky1 and then you can attach to the forum using the Additional Options button on the reply page.
The reason you will need to rename is that the forum will only accept a file name to be attached once, so if you have to attach it a second time you will need to rename again to maybe CadJunky2 etc etc..


Hood