I have had numerous issues with probing in MACH4 together with the ESS SmoothStepper (MACH3 worked fine) – so much that I had given up using the probe at all. A couple of days ago I gave it another shot, and found a very unexpected solution, and now the probing works perfectly.

The most common probing error I ran into was that at any time during a probing action MACH4 just stopped and reported:

“ERROR: No contact with probe”

I had checked the electrical side and everything looked perfectly fine there, so then I was going to look into how the software behaved. I enabled MACH4 logging facility (Menu: Diagnostic->Logging…) so try to catch some clues of what is going on. And here comes the unexpected part – as long as the log window is open, the probing never fails! I have repeated this many, many times and it always works. And this ‘good effect’ seems to stay on a bit after I close the log window, but after a while the errors start appearing again. If I open the log window again, the probing immediately works perfectly.

Very weird behaviour, but at least now I have a workaround.

It is a little ironic that I cannot find the actual cause of the problem because the diagnostic tool actually fixes the problem…

My setup:

-----===== Mach4 build 4.2.0.4612, ESS build 278.1 =====-----

Henrik

Be on the look out for a new ess release that has corrected this.

I just tried the two latest recommended combinations, but the problem still remains;

• Mach4 Hobby version 4.2.0.4809 with ESS build 285
• Mach4 Hobby version 4.2.0.4809 with ESS build 283

The difference from the older version I was running is that now it do produce the probe errors even if the log window is up, so now I perhaps have something to help me find the root cause for the problem.

Are you aware of some new updates to ESS that will be available soon?

Greg at Warp9TD has done extensive testing with regard to the probing issues and informs us that Mach4 build 5125 (and upwards) together with the latest ESS build 298 (the original, beta, build 298 was modified) now resolves any probing problems. I have not fully tested this but you may wish to give it a try.

Tweakie.

Just tried Mach 5125 + ESS 298, did not help. Since this seems to be mostly related to ESS, I am moving over to their forum.

Thanks for all suggestions!