Thanks for the replies guys.
I've had a weekend to "play" with things and think I've started to understand what some of all this means.
But the big learning moment came when I realised, and this is the important bit, I didn't need to set ANY Inputs or Outputs.
I was worrying that if I didn't have everything configured perfectly then I blow something up somewhere when I turned it on for the first time.
Well, I'm here to say. Nope, just:
- wire the SmartBobUSB to the stepper controllers
- Install the SmartBob plugin (following Steve's doco)
- Plug everything in and turn it on
- Press the jog button
and all of my axis jogged about.
The only settings I had to muck about with were the motor parameters.
I have a leadscrew with a pitch of 5mm and a stepper with 200 steps per revolution and I've set my DIV268N-5A stepper controller step angle subdivision to 1/8.
Stepper to leadscrew is 1:1. Mach 4 is in metric units.
So I set Counts per Unit to (200*
/5 = 320 (but only after I took ages to realise you had to click on a particular Motor to change it's values)
It was the Velocity that took a while. The Mach 4 manual states "Set a value of a max velocity that seems reasonable" and try it. But what on earth is "reasonable"? perhaps 0.8796. perhaps 9999. How would I know? It started on 31.0 (no idea why) but that meant the jog was so slow as to be almost unnoticeable. To cut a long story short, I ended up setting it to 1400 and now it seems to move about at a "reasonable" rate. At 31 it made lots of noise, at 2000 it squealed and SmartBob threw internal overrun errors. 1400 seems to work. Talk about trial and error
Now I know that "Inputs" are only for EXTRA inputs that you MAY have wired up on your CNC (like my limit switches) and "Outputs" are for EXTRA things you would like to tell your CNC to do (like turn my spindle on) it's all making more sense.
So, on to working out why my Estop seems to be wired backwards, the limit switches don't do anything and I have no idea how to test the spindle on/off. Baby steps...