Hello everyone,

hope this is the right spot for this request for help.
I work in IT, I "inherited" the infrastructure of a company with little to no documentation.
The plant manager is now asking me to set up a backup PC for our USB-controlled resin-treatment machine. This is the first time I see the software.

The current machine runs Mach 3.043.022 on Windows 7 pro 64 bit.
I found the setup on their file-server and tried installing it on a Windows 10 machine.
The main issue I'm having so far is with the SmoothStepper drivers, I tried downloading, them, copying the .dll from the current machine.

Can you please let me know if Win 10 just sn't doable, or if I'm missing something else?

thank you

Win10 should work, I use it with a lathe and mill using M3 043.062.  I assume you're using a usb version of the smooth stepper drives?  Have you verified on their website that the plugin is compatible with win10? Have you got the Mach3 manual?

Oh and you also need to copy across the XML config file from the old machine which sets up all the ports and pins etc.

Hi,
are you 100% that the motion controller you actually have is a USB SmoothStepper. SmoothStepper is a brand name of Warp9 TD, and so common it is that often any old USB
motion control board is called a SmoothStepoper, when it is not in fact a SmoothStepper at all.

A picture of the board would clarify the situation.

Note that any motion control board must have its unique plugin. Trying to use Warp9's plugin to drive an RnR motion controller for instance, will fail miserably.

Craig

ok, so.
Attached you find a picture of the USB-connected board (smoothstepper is written upside down but it's there) and a picture of the Device Management window. I highlighted the relevant parts.

I already copied the XML and I can correctly select them at launch.

Can you please elaborate on the plugin?

Have you added the plugin to Mach3?  It should be in Mach3\Plugins.  Then open Mach3 and configure it in the contig/config plugins menu.

Have you added the plugin to Mach3?  It should be in Mach3\Plugins.  Then open Mach3 and configure it in the contig/config plugins menu.

that seems to be a problem. I do have plugins in Mach3\plugins, including the smoothstepper one.
But when I open Mach3, I only get to choose the profile (where I can see my XMLs profiles), then I get smoothstepper error "no USB devices found".
Which seems logical to me given that the Smoothstpper driver isn't properly installed.
After this error the software fails to load correctly, so I can't access any config menu to configure plugins.

Am I missing something? I have zero experience with this software and I am working pretty much blindly here... I apologize if I miss something very obvious.