Hello everyone,

I have a dspmc that I have been running successfully for several years.  I just upgraded the firmware to 8.14 from 7.19.  Installed the e104 fpga, updated the Mach3 plugin.  All seemed to go okay or at least I thought so.

There are two problems:

When I open Mach3 and go to the config plugins screen the pages with the each axes have all of the fields blanked out and nothing  can be entered in them.

When I power on the machine the DSPMC is not visible to the PC (via Mach3 or ipscan) until I cycle the power on the DPSMC after the PC has booted up.   I have it connected directly to the PC with static IPs assigned.

It was working before and no hardware changes have been made.  I assume that I cannot "downgrade" the firmware since I've changed the fpga as well.

Has anyone seen this before of have any ideas?

Thanks,

Dave

Hello Dave,

Here are some thoughts on your issues:

Blank config screen:
- Did you upgrade your PC from Windows XP to Windows 7 or Windows 8? Or did you upgrade from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit version?

DSPMC not connecting:
- 8.14 is an outdated firmware version, I believe the latest version is 9.01 which should be available on the website (and don't forget to use the latest plugin that comes with it because we made a change for the DSPMC and the plugin to reject connections when incompatible firmware and plugin versions try to connect).
- Can the DSPMC be pinged from the command prompt? This can be tested by opening the windows command prompt and with the command "ping <dspmc ipAddress" (Ex. ping 192.168.0.50).


-Marc
Vital System Inc.

No OS changes or any other software or hardware changes were made. 

Device is not available (no ping response) until it's power is cycled.  After that it will connect to the  PC (it was working before).

I will download the latest version and try it again.    You guys need to change the names on the download files to indicate which version it is.

Hello,

Here's a fix for the "blank" config window. This problem is usually caused by using Mach3 and our plugin on a 64-bit OS like Windows 7 and up.

Are you using windows XP or 7? If windows 7, is it 32 or 64-bit. I ask this because it seems that you’re seeing a problem that is present with using our Mach3 plugin with windows 7 64-bit.

Here’s what you have to do:
1.   Open Windows Command Prompt as an administrator
       -   Open the windows start menu and search “Command Prompt”
       -   Right click on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator”
       -   If you’re using XP, just open command prompt
2.   Type “cd c:\mach3” and hit enter
3.   Type “regsvr32 ntgraph.ocx” and hit enter
4.   A popup should display saying that the process was successful
5.   You should be good to go.


And yes, aside from that, try first downloading the latest plugin and firmware versions from the DSPMC webpage.
http://www.vitalsystem.com/portal/motion/dspmc/DSPMC_StepGen.zip

If you still see the connection issues from pinging the device from the command prompt, check to see if there are any other networks present on your PC such as wifi, other network cards, etc. and verify that the DSPMC doesn't have the same IP address as any other device on the network. We just use the "192.168.0.50" address for simplicity, but it is possible that you already have a device with this address on the network which causes conflicts with the connectivity?

-Marc
Vital System Inc.

I'm using 32 bit XP.  I fixed the blank config screen by reinstalling Mach3.

I did not make any network or other changes to the PC.  I only upgraded the DSPMC's firmware. 
The DSPMC is not visible to the PC (by any ping or ipscan method) until I cycle the power on the DSPMC after the PC has booted then it's fine.  I'm working around it for now.

Thanks,

Dave