Happy Easter to all of you following my trials and triumphs.
Fresh in from several hours of running making some parts to help a friend and here is the report.
The good.
Motion is excellent and better than ever. Machine ran for 12 hours without crashing over the course of several days. Win7 on a Dell SFF SX270. Not bad for a $50 computer.
Feed hold response is excellent. In Mach 3 you had to wait for the buffer to empty before motion would come to a noisy halt. Now it just stops like is supposed to do.
Was cutting with a .250 3fl ZrN carbide endmill 18k rpm with a .050 doc and .250 woc at 95 ipm. Could have gone faster but with a 1.5" stickout I didn't want all the flex.
The not so good.
Coolant will stay on even if you E-stop the machine or disable the machine. Not the end of the world but something that i would like to see fixed.
At the present time it is not honoring the coolant delay setting that I have setup on the general config page. I need to verify a few things before I file a bug report.
The needs to be done.
Lua coding for the all of my hardwired buttons. I wound up having to fudge the tool release so I could change tools. Probably not the safest thing so I won't go into detail on how I did it. I want to incorporate an interlock so I can't release the tool at 18K RPM.
I also need to connect my spindle rpm output to the DPSMC input so I can read the RPM. There is not a spindle ramp delay setting to make the machine wait for the spindle to come up to speed. If Mach4 can read the rpm then you can make it wait until the spindle is at a certain percentage of speed and then the machine will go. Between not have the spindle rpm being read into mach and the coolant delay not working, I had to add in a delay to my code after every toolchange. (5=ms. 5. =sec Decimal or not is very different)The machine now moves so fast at full rapids that it can rapid to the opposite side of the table and start cutting before the spindle is at full speed or the coolant has decided to flow.
The nice to have done.
Wire servo drive and spindle drive faults to stop the machine if a drive faults.
New screen set. The grays on blues on grays has no contrast and no appeal to me.
I also hate having to go from the run tab to the jog tab to the file tab and back. I don't have a real mouse on this machine just a joystick that does mouse emulation as part of the keyboard.
Since I have the DSPMC with the Analog inputs I would like to have RRO, FRO and SRO. I also should be able to get from the spindle VFD a signal indicating spindle load and read it into Mach. Same thing with the servo drives.
More to come,
Mike