Hi Dale,
are you Aussie? Is it warm enough yet!
Ok, the stepper driver has a setting which would make your desired 'Steps per Unit' 1000.
If you set your stepper driver to 5000 pulse rev revolution combined with directly driven 5mm pitch screws
results in 1000 Steps per Unit.
Its another way of saying that every pluse issued by Mach/BoB/Controller will advance the axis 1 um. That's pretty impressive.
You have not said what sort of controller you are using?.
If you wish to spin your motors at 500 rpm and your driver is set to 5000 pulses per rev then
Pulses per minute= 500 X 5000
=2,500,000
or Pulses per sec =41666 or near as dammit 42kHz.
As you can see my question about your controller is not idle. Machs parallel port is natively 25kHz. It would not be
fast enough to signal your driver with that high resolution. You can increase the kernel speed in Mach3 parallel port,
if I recall there is a setting for 45kHz. The downside is that the faster you try to make a parallel port go the likelihood
of glitches /stalls and stutter goes up markedly.
For this reason I would not recommend such high resolution if you are attempting to use a parallel port, your original
setting of 2000 pulse per rev is better. That corresponds to a linear resolution of 2.5um per pulse, still very impressive.
Even 2.5um resolution is likely to be more accurate than your machine....or if your machine is that good/expensive
then what are you doing pissing around with Mach in the first place?
If you are using an Ethernet SmoothStepper say, by way of comparison, that has a max pulse frequency of 4Mhz.....
that is 160 TIMES faster than Machs parallel port (at 25kHz), thus you can set your resolution high, even higher than 5000
pulse per rev and still be within the capability of the SmoothStepper.
Resolutions of finer than 1um (excepting wafer scale semiconductor manufacturing gear at millions of dollars each) is for those
people who like to jerk off and/or brag.....not what I would expect from an Aussie!
Craig