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Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #100 on: April 02, 2018, 06:36:40 AM »
Having finished installing the Mach3 drivers for the RNR Motion card, and tested every aspect of the card now, I thought I'd put in some notes for anyone thinking of this breakout card for Win10 conversion of their mill under Mach3.

This isn't a review. It's just what I learnt from using this card, which seems to offer a cheap alternative to the parallel port as a possible path up to Windows 10.

There are a few cards like this from different manufacturers. All seem to use the same driver for Mach3, and all seem to have similar pinouts. The driver is the RNR Eco Motion v2.0 driver. Some have a few differences, so perhaps there are different drivers also, but generally they seem to be the same from what I could tell. Most sellers seem to include a disk with a copy of the drivers, some chinese manuals and some english manuals, with say different things ( eg, configured completely differently ) however the english drivers and instructions do work.

The card looks like this.



That picture shows a few missing components - mainly because I accidentally shorted it to 240vAC due to a faulty spindle driver... And attempted a failed repair, but a different version from a different supplier worked with the same driver and came with new drivers as well.

RNR Motion Cards use a 32F103 processor, which uses a USB interface to connect to the PC. It went straight in on mine, but others might need to adjust their USB settings under Win10.  This wasn't a problem for me, but may require use of Zadig if you have Windows 10 attempt to use the wrong driver, which can happen if you use these chips and is easily and permanently fixed by manually selecting the correct USB Windows driver.

Note: The windows driver and the Mach3 driver are different. The windows driver should automatically work, but can be fixed quickly otherwise.

Once this is installed, copy the correct RNR Motion .DLL driver to the Mach3 plugins and Mach3 instantly recognizes it, and will put up driver card status updates onscreen - Which is probably normal, but I've found several chinese drivers in the past didn't even do this.

Plugin configuration looks like this;



I don't know what Home Setup does yet, or "Rapid Stop" and I haven't tested "MPG-Disable" or Spindle Multi-step Speed or calibration. However the Inputs View does show which inputs are being selected whether they are configured in Mach3 or not, which is useful when troubleshooting.

The card drives 4 axis - and each axis is driven by a push-pull driver, so you can configure as positive or negative into the stepper controller. It's only 5v though, and there's just one 5v output and two ground outputs, so better to drive as positive current loop into the stepper controllers.  There are outputs for Pulse and Direction for each axis.

The MPG input ( i mentioned the pinouts in my previous post ) are all 3.3v pulled-up inputs and the A and B inputs are 5v and require a 5v capable wheel. They are positive A and B inputs. Both will be "low" when on a detent, with each pulsing once per detent rotation. These are NOT buffered and care should be taken to avoid causing damage to the board when wiring these up. They will either be a 10 pin 0.1" pitch header which takes a standard polarized IDC 10way connector, or will be screw terminated.

There are four other inputs which can be set up, and are 24v pulled-up output and should be tied to ground to activate. External supply of 24v is required, though I also tried 5v and it worked just fine, though using the USB ground or 5v supply is not a good idea.

The 24v inputs also drive four outputs and these are mapped to four input pins on Port 3 - in fact all inputs are mapped to Port3 in the order they are displayed ( vertical before horizontal ) in the configuration panel for the controller. Even the A and B pins for the MPG, though these don't have to be set. ONLY the A and B pins don't need to be mapped. They are MPG1 by default. The rest must be manually mapped to whatever application you put them to. The labels are just "suggestions" and it's pretty much up to you what you do with them. If you don't want x10, for example, you could map it to e-stop.

Only the four 24v inputs are opto-isolated. The MPG inputs go straight to the main chip.

The outputs are also mapped directly from Port 3. So Port 3, pin 1 can be an input or an output, but the two operate independently.  Setting the output low doesn't automatically make the input low as well. They are independent although they use a common ground that is independent from the stepper output ground.

The analog output is a 10v output, but in practice I found this changed up to around 9.3 volts depending on the wiring and load placed on it when attached to a brushless controller. There's about 5 or 6 config screens to get this going - they are shown in the english manual and the pictures are correct. Once installed, they can be used. They have a separate ground to the digital inputs and the stepper outputs yet again, and must be supplied 10v and Gnd from the controller. The output can then be fed back into the controller and works well enough. I tested it with a chinese XDJD WS55-220 Brushless spindle controller and the only problem I encountered was that the controller won't start if the voltage moves up slowly - such as in the auto-calibration test. I didn't use positional feedback for the motor - just output and open-loop control.  When the voltage moves up slowly, the controller tries to start the motor, stalls and fails to start it at all. Then nothing happens. Sufficient voltage MUST be sent to the controller to start with - more than 1.5v. Otherwise it will fail everytime. Once Mach3 was configured to 1.5v minimum output, there was no further problem with the analog output running the brushless controller, though I think this was a controller fault and not the control board.

All of these boards seem to cost around $20 to $30 and came with a USB cable and a driver. They use an original USB cable too, in case you want a longer one, which you probably will.

I hope this helps anyone considering using one of these to get around the parallel port limitations in windows 10 to determine if this card meets their requirements. In my opinion, it's greatest weakness is that it only has four generic buffered inputs, and it's biggest strength is that it's cheap and works well, with drivers, manual and even english instructions supplied - or at least they should be.

David.
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #101 on: May 08, 2018, 04:17:47 AM »
Hey sir. i am trying to get my 600w spindle to work, but i can't seem to figure it out, would you kindly help me. i dont have a VFD, just a motor PWM driver and a relay in the middle. I need to do PWM. I tried the AVI (supposedly the 0-10v), and output1 (supposedly on/off)
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #102 on: May 08, 2018, 05:49:25 AM »
Do you have the board pictured in the post I made? If so, you need to supply 10v into the 10v pin, and GND into the GND pin. You then get a 10v signal out, which will drive the spindle motor from the AVI output. It is PWM, but it does do 0v to 10v. But you need to supply 10v to the 10v input. AVI and AGND are on one row of pins, and 10v is on the other, but they are all next to each other.

What spindle controller do you have? Some have a 10v output, and others do not. If it doesn't, you'll need an external PSU. A $5 buck converter will take 24v from your stepper supply and give you a clean 10v output which can be used.

Let me know a little more and I'll go through it step by step. You set up Mach3 like this.






Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #104 on: May 08, 2018, 07:45:28 AM »
« Last Edit: May 08, 2018, 07:47:19 AM by khomouda »
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #105 on: May 08, 2018, 08:32:43 AM »
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Pz_J3lN6rzcu1wAyWTBhY4WOVbChUZio
but I cant get 10v at AVI

I assume that voltage says "10v" - so that's right.

You need to add some throttle to get 10v at AVI...

If you set it up like I said, then click "reset" to enable Mach3... Then click "Spindle CW F5" button on spindle speed, then click in spindle speed and type 12000 and press enter. That should enable the spindle manually, and put 10v out on AVI... Well, 9.5 or something close.

You can also go Function, Calibrate Spindle, Autocal, And as the control ratio increases to 1, you should see the voltage go up over time ( as another test ).

OK, so now how to wire up...

Well, the PWM square wave would be present on the board opto that leads to the AVI circuit, so you could modify the breakout board to reroute that to AVI if you wanted, but put a multimeter across the pot that comes with the spindle driver... Is it 10v? If that's so, then you have all three wires you need on the pot circuit, just run 10v to 10v, the GND side to ACM and the middle leg of the pot is what will go to AVI. Then you don't need an external 10v supply if that's the case.

If that doesn't work and you want to break out the PCM output, I can put up a drawing showing you where to get it from if you like?

David
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #106 on: May 08, 2018, 08:59:55 AM »

Actually, I need to correct that - the AVI output is a 1KHz PWM output, so it shows as a voltage to a multimeter, and a PWM output to an oscilloscope... So you can use the AVI output as PWM, however it doesn't have much power, so if it doesn't work then you'll either need to add a transistor external to the board to increase the pull-down current and use this as the -ve input with +ve going to the 10v supply...

Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #107 on: May 08, 2018, 09:56:38 AM »
Perfectly clear (the second post), when I go home, I will try it, but I need the transistor that you mentioned name, and a small schematic,,,, would be wonderful.
I am a hobbyist and know little about electronics, but I have an oscilloscope and can use it
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #108 on: May 08, 2018, 10:12:12 AM »

The output is basically 10v - 0.6v for the emitter-follows-base circuit post-opto, but there's a 1.5K current limiting resistor on the output.

So at 10v, that's about 6.6mA

That should be enough to drive an opto on your spindle board, but if it's not, then you need a small darlington drive transistor, such as a BD682 ( PNP ). Connect Ground to the -ve input for PCM on your spindle board, and connect 10v to the collector of the transistor. Connect the output of AVI to the base, and the collector goes to +ve input on your spindle board.

This makes a non-inverting amplifier for the output and while it loses a little voltage, should have enough power to drive the opto input of your spindle board.

Assuming it has an opto input. But it's up to 12v, so it probably does.  If you want to be lazy, and your inputs are sensitive enough, you can even run a link from 5v to 10v and run the PWM input off of 5v instead.

Anyway, experiment before you go sticking in a transistor... And remember if you want to see a PWM output, don't select 100% speed or 0% speed, as these are DC levels. Finally, my setup was for 12000 RPM, and I don't know what yours is, so you might need to change it.

David
Re: Mach3 under win10
« Reply #109 on: May 09, 2018, 03:57:33 AM »
Dear David, this is what I am getting from the AVI without any mod