Hello All
Very new to all this so please go easy on me.......
I have the Mach2 on demo and I am very pleased with it so far.
A pal of mine has built me a stepper driver and with some old stepper motors from ebay we have with the aid of Mach 2 got them moving.
The problem we have is that the lap top we are useing seems to be too fast
When we set it running it's a bit hit and miss but if we make the lap top work at the same time as running the motors with mach 2
i.e  Open a big program at the same time it all runs fine untill the lap top has finshed opening up the big program?
intrested to hear any idears on what is going on.
Acer Travel Mate 4050  1.3 Ghz
home made driver

Thanks Jason
   

Hi Jason, I had the same type of problem and found that Mach 2/3 won't run properly on a laptop because it uses clock manipulation to achieve power saving etc. Mach 3 takes some liberties with windows clocks etc and can't handle any clock variations. You will find that it runs like a bomb on a desktop. Give it a shot!
Regards
Les

Thanks for your reply Les
Will give it a try and see what happens. My P.C is in bits at the moment so will have to get on and put it back together.
The plan is to build a P.C just to run the CNC if you have any sugestons on spec for the P.C it would be a big help for us.

Is there any differance with mach 2 and 3 ?

Thanks

Jason

Hi Jason, They will run just the same but Mach3 has qiute a few enhancements. Your pc should have about a 1 gig processor and performance seems to improve with more ram.
Good luck
Les

Thanks
I have a small hard drive I was going to use. But will get as much ram as I can get in there then ( with the small amount i know about this sort of thing does look like the way to go ) My pal is an I.T manager for a local company and has a few old P.C's that we salvage parts from so it just depends what brake's down and when as to what we can get our hands on. But as the parts are free  ;DI do'nt hasle him to much.

I will post some photo's of our set up as soon as we have made it look a bit better. It is at the moment just driving the stepper motors but I do plan to build a plasma cutting table. I have drawn it all out on Cad and as soon as we get the stepper motors doing some thing like we want I will start to build the tabe so I am hoping that we our very close now. May be by the end of the week I can start to get some parts for the table.

Thanks again for your help

Jason

 I am not familiar with Laptops but I do know there are setting to slow down CPU clock speed etc when Windows thinks its not needed. Have a look around control panel and see if there are options there. Might be an idea to go into the power settings and set it up as a desktop, always on etc .

Hood

Thanks for the suggestion
I have tried changing the CPU speed and it seems to make no difference. It looks to be a priority thing within windows it's self.
When you make an interrupt say moving the mouse this takes priority over and  slows down the out put.
It is difficult to tell but is does look like it is just the out put to the port as when you run with nothing connected it seems to run fine.

Jason