I have an Industrial Hobbies 12z mill I converted to CNC that until today has worked flawlessly.

In the attached picture you can see it roughed the bore in the middle no problem using a 1/2 inch endmill. After the bore I changed tools to a smaller 1/4 endmill. I don't know if it is related or not but while probing my z hight I noticed the z axis was behaving strangely. I turned the velocity down for the z axis stepper and it started working fine again so I continued on.

As you can see the ring around the outside started off just fine and quickly turned into well I don't know. I didn't catch it immediately because the flood coolant made the issue hard to see.

Once I noticed what was going on I tried stopping the feed just to find out both my vistaCNC pendant and my touchscreen monitor where both unresponsive so I had to use the e-stop to turn it off. Mach 4 did still function normally if I used a mouse and keyboard but the pendant and touchscreen both quit working.

I'm a little lost as to what is going on here I don't know if the frozen touchscreen and pendant even have anything to do with it.

This machine runs steppers and I have never had issues with missed steps before however if this is missed steps I'm a little confused as to how it was still making a perfect circle all the way around the bore rather than just wondering off.

I may have found the issue?

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=28447.0

I found this topic which refers to Mach 3. It sounds like that issue may be similar to mine. I did increase the feedrate a couple times during the operation.

I am using Mach 4 but is increasing the feedrate above 100% still an issue?

Hi,

I'm a little lost as to what is going on here I don't know if the frozen touchscreen and pendant even have anything to do with it.

When using <FeedHold> the program is paused, not stopped. Mach at anyone time can have only one master....so in this instance
the Gcode interpreter is the master....even if it is paused, and so the pendant plugin will be ignored, as will the touchscreen or any MachGUI
control. If however you <Stop> the program then the Gcode interpreter ceases to be the master and the motion planner can accept a new source of
instructions, the pendant for instance.

Craig

Hi thanks for the reply.

I'm a little confused though. Up until this I have always been able to use the touchscreen no problem while Gcode was running. After I completely stopped the machine I never did regain the use of the pendant or the touchscreen.

I also don't understand how this caused the part to turn out like it did unless playing with things such as feedrate while the Gcode is running causes problems.

Is the pendant and touchscreen connected by USB? Could this be a noise issue? If you run without the spindle does it look ok?

Yes the touchscreen is ran by usb and the pendant is plugged into a port on the back of the monitor.

I'm about to go out into the shop and play around with it some more. Maybe ill try starting the program over on the same part and see what it does.

Unfortunately I didn't get around to running it again. I just built the enclosure for the mill and had a few small leaks I wanted to deal with before I made another mess on the floor.

As I stated before I haven't really had much for problems with the machine before however I should point out that I have made a lot of changes to the machine lately.

I am running a brand new VFD because my previous one did not support a braking resistor. I have also transplanted all of my controls into a much larger cabinet. For the most part everything is the same inside the cabinet. The larger cabinet finally gave me the space to completely separate all of my high voltage and low voltage components and wiring.

Three things I think could potentially be problems:

1) The wires running from my VFD to the spindle motor are currently running directly next to all three axis motor wires for approximately a foot before splitting off in different directions. The spindle motor wires are not shielded however all of the stepper wiring is shielded and attached to the panel. Is this ok? Previously the spindle wires exited the enclosure away from everything else.

2) My windows 10 computer that runs Mach has been moved inside the enclosure. This I could potentially see as a problem. The pc is inside an enclosure however at the moment the top cover is missing due to a clearance issue with the cpu cooling fan. Another concern I have here is the pc itself is powered externally so it is grounded to a different circuit than everything else. This is just temporarily the case because I don't currently have a neutral inside the cabinet just two hots and a ground, everything else in the cabinet is able the run on 220v.

3) Both my touchscreen and pendant run to a usb hub located outside my enclosure. The single usb wire running from the hub to the pc was just dangling below my panel within an inch or so of the VFD and stepper wires. I'm unsure how susceptible usb cables are to noise and if that noise could have an effect on Mach4? Today I did run a piece of conduit for the usb cable just to clean things up a bit so if it is an issue it should be resolved.

The pc is the issue I'm the most concerned about. I do currently have the case of the computer isolated from the enclosure ground since it gets it's ground from a separate circuit.

Sorry for rambling on but this is the first time I have ran into an issue that I haven't been easily able to resolve. If anyone has some feedback on the things I pointed out above it would be appreciated.

Well it turns out I was probably just overthinking things.

I found the bolt holding my y axis coupler to the flat on the stepper shaft had come loose. Luckily after running the part again it came out nearly perfect.