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Yahoo groups are closing on December 14th 2019
开云体育Yahoo groups are closing on December 14th. ? All content will be deleted. ? If you want to backup the posts, photos & files from this group you can use a program called PG Offline. ? It has a 14 day free trial which will give ample time to download this group. ? http://www.personalgroupware.com/downloads.htm ? Cheers, ? Wilson Logan (PGO Creator). |
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Re: Spindle Speed Controllers
Hi John,
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It's not that they are discontinued, just that I'm behind in manufacturing. :( As you would know, you need to use a rail to rail opamp to get as close to the rails as possible. 0.2V is about right. You also loose the same at the top end as well. A lot of VFDs allow you to set thr min and max voltage rage so you can zero out 0.2V floor. And you are correct, I can't manufacture them for a bowl of rice. :) Cheers, Peter On 6/10/2019 3:47 am, 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] wrote:
I see that Peter Homann's web site lists his Digispeed controllers as sold out. --
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Web : email : groups@... Phone : +61 421 601 665 |
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Spindle Speed Controllers
开云体育I see that Peter Homann's web site lists his Digispeed controllers as sold out. ? I have one of the? DC-06 controllers for step/dir but want to use a PWM to 0-10V control.? ? Putting this search term into Amazon.ca "0-10V PWM Digital to Analog Signal Tranformer Converter Module MACH3 PLC" ? Yields quite a few hits one as low as $10 with shipping? so I would imagine Peter's devices have been priced out of the market.? ? Has anyone used these far east units for speed control?? ? What I breadboard up with op-amps etc. only goes down to about 0.2V and I suspect the far east units aren't any better.? To go right to 0.0V I'd have to add a split supply and that brings the complexity of a small module way too high for a bread-boarded project. ? OTOH, maybe the cheap far east units don't really go to 0V either. ? Thanks John ? ? ? ? "ELS! Nothing else works as well for your Lathe" Automation Artisans Inc. www dot autoartisans dot com ? |
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Mach4 lathe & pokeys - Quadature Encoder Setup
I'm using a CNC4PC M16D board and I'm confused on now to? set up the AMT103 encoder and the correct pokeys assigned pins. I'm getting very clean A, B & Index pulses from the Encoder but only see True RPM displayed when checking the INDEX(lathe) on the Spindle TAB. If I check the ENCODER(lathe)? it will display a erratic RPM ~1/2 the value. I have been using PK pins 8,12 and 13 as recommended in the Pokey manual. Every thing else seems to be working.? |
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Steve Blackmore
Any faults on older systems are hardware or operator related, mostly the latter.? See for what a stand alone control looks like. Generally modules can be replaced if they break.? I'm saying no more on the Pathpilot product.? Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Hmm. My comments didn't stand out like I thought they would. I'll highlight them now by removing the '>'
See below. A few points of clarification:Does bring up an interesting point. The HAL and INI file inside LinuxCNC define the hardware. There is no real requirement that Path Pilot _needs_ that hardware. My current experiment does use a MESA product. To be more precise I have a MACH3 on WIN-XP running through a PMDX-126 Bob driven with either direct parallel port or a USB Smooth Stepper I borrow from my CNC router. Or I have the parallel port or a MESA 7i92H connected into the PMDX-126 running LinuxCNC on the second boot partition. It requires a different HAL and INI file for each hardware environment but what I'm ultimately trying to show is that you can dual boot the PC into either OS and not change one bit of hardware to be running LinuxCNC. But, a WIN-XP machine with parallel port is tough with DC servos that have short step pulse delays from WIN-XP while the motor continues to turn, counting up encoder pulses. That results in a following error and a stop. A smooth stepper is much better but unfortunately doesn't work with LinuxCNC. Hence the Ethernet 7i92H connection for LinuxCNC. John
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
See below.
From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...] Sent: September-23-19 7:26 PM To: mach1mach2cnc@... Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC A few points of clarification: Again, I have no personal knowledge of FANUC products but I find it very hard to believe that there are no unsquashed bugs even after years of usage. I’m curious though: How hard is it to interface you FANUC with a new touch screen? Or a new Ethernet card? Or transfer programs from a new version of Windows over the network? Am I stuck with 2010 vintage hardware that may be hard to service? PathPilot is essentially a pretty face on LinuxCNC and utilizes all of LinuxCNC rather than just the HAL. Tormach funded the development of several additions to LinuxCNC such as a greatly improved trajectory planner and these are in the fully public version of LinuxCNC. Is the FANUC trajectory planner perfect? Does it perfectly handle HSM toolpaths? Does Mach3? PathPilot requires a Mesa 7i92, 5i25 or 6i25. All of these cards are supported by basic LinuxCNC and cost less than $100 each. Documentation and support software is available from Mesa without charge. Insofar as I know there is no relationship between Tormach and Mesa. Certainly I have recently ordered a 7i92 card directly from Mesa with absolutely no indication that I had to be a Tormach customer Does bring up an interesting point. The HAL and INI file inside LinuxCNC define the hardware. There is no real requirement that Path Pilot _needs_ that hardware. My current experiment does use a MESA product. To be more precise I have a MACH3 on WIN-XP running through a PMDX-126 Bob driven with either direct parallel port or a USB Smooth Stepper I borrow from my CNC router. Or I have the parallel port or a MESA 7i92H connected into the PMDX-126 running LinuxCNC on the second boot partition. It requires a different HAL and INI file for each hardware environment but what I'm ultimately trying to show is that you can dual boot the PC into either OS and not change one bit of hardware to be running LinuxCNC. But, a WIN-XP machine with parallel port is tough with DC servos that have short step pulse delays from WIN-XP while the motor continues to turn, counting up encoder pulses. That results in a following error and a stop. A smooth stepper is much better but unfortunately doesn't work with LinuxCNC. Hence the Ethernet 7i92H connection for LinuxCNC. John From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...] Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 6:47 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC Fanuc 21 firmware has been out since 2010 ish - any was just a development due to hardware changes of software/firmware that had been out for many years. Bugs were eradicated years ago and there has been no need to improve on it since. If it ain't broke it don't need fixing.... My original reply was LinuxCNC related. Pathpilot is a commercial Tormach product and is also neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC. It is a Linux based system, as are Fanuc controllers. Pathpilot was developed because neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC did what Tormach wanted, so they took the open source HAL from LinuxCNC as a basis for their own work. To counteract any licencing issues they had to release their software but cleverly limited it to some custom Mesa style boards made specifically for themselves.. I seem to remember they also bought out the company that made the boards to protect against clones. Steve Blackmore On 23/09/2019 21:42:22, 'Ken Strauss' ken.strauss@... [mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote: I have no experience with Fanuc 21 controllers but I’ve never encountered any bug free software after over fifty years of computer usage. Congratulations! I’m sure that you understand why Tormach doesn’t exactly make an effort to ensure that you can use their free software on non-Tormach machines. On the other hand PathPilot runs on most any reasonably modern cheap PC and touch screen with no need to find an XT machine with a parallel port. BTW, the original question was regarding Mach3 and LinuxCNC rather than Fanuc controllers. From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...] Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 4:32 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC John Stevenson and I did look at Pathpilot when it first came out.. At the same time we obtained a couple of stand alone panel mounted clone Fanuc 21 style lathe controllers. It took me little longer than a week to get one of the clone controls wired and working fully closed loop. It's still working now, never needed any bugs fixing as it didn't have any. It has the great advantage of NOT using pc hardware or cluttering the shop with a keyboard or mouse. Pathpilot looks very pretty but was an utter bastard to get it to work with non tormach hardware and we never fully sorted it. It was quickly abandoned to the trash and forgotten about until now. As Dan noted - quite easy to piss off the Linux guru's - any criticism is taken as if you called their mother or granny a whore LOL Steve Blackmore On 22/09/2019 18:09:02, 'Ken Strauss' ken.strauss@... [mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote: I used Mach3 for several years on my Tormach PCNC770. When Tormach released PathPilot (which is mostly LinuxCNC) 3 years ago I converted. There is absolutely no comparison between the two types of control software.. LinuxCNC hasn’t crashed or randomly done funny things over the last 3 years, the user interface is very attractive with clean elements instead of the gaudy default colours of Mach3, touch screen operation is a delight, the tool table works reliably, soft limits work, I can transfer files to my machine over Ethernet and even surf the net while running a job, the GCode dialect supports named variables and conditional execution which is great for hand written code but most importantly bugs are fixed with updated releases several times a year rather than being ignored. In summary, I would even consider going back to Mach3. From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...] Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 12:32 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: Re: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC Hi John - It's some years ago now but I gave it a good test but gave up. I'm not a programmer or software developer or any other sort of guru so failed to get it to work reliably. Unless you know Linux really well - forget it. It seems to have been written by some clever people but for specific instances and hardware and if your machine or method of working didn't exactly match you were on your own and expected to modify or amend to suit yourself. The GUI interfaces were mostly appallingly bad too. A quick look a few minutes ago shows nothing much appears to have changed in years LOL... Steve Blackmore On 21/09/2019 01:13:13, 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote: Anyone on this group who tried LinuxCNC for a while and then returned to using MACHx? If so, could you list the reasons why? Thanks John _____ This email has been scanned by Netintelligence <> _____ _____ This email has been scanned by Netintelligence _____ _____ This email has been scanned by Netintelligence _____ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] |
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
开云体育A few points of clarification: Again, I have no personal knowledge of FANUC products but I find it very hard to believe that there are no unsquashed bugs even after years of usage. I’m curious though: How hard is it to interface you FANUC with a new touch screen? Or a new Ethernet card? Or transfer programs from a new version of Windows over the network? Am I stuck with 2010 vintage hardware that may be hard to service? ? PathPilot is essentially a pretty face on LinuxCNC and utilizes all of LinuxCNC rather than just the HAL. Tormach funded the development of several additions to LinuxCNC such as a greatly improved trajectory planner and these are in the fully public version of LinuxCNC. Is the FANUC trajectory planner perfect? Does it perfectly handle HSM toolpaths? Does Mach3? ? PathPilot requires a Mesa 7i92, 5i25 or 6i25. All of these cards are supported by basic LinuxCNC and cost less than $100 each. Documentation and support software is available from Mesa without charge. Insofar as I know there is no relationship between Tormach and Mesa. Certainly I have recently ordered a 7i92 card directly from Mesa with absolutely no indication that I had to be a Tormach customer ? From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 6:47 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC ? ? Fanuc 21 firmware has been out since 2010 ish - any was just a development due to hardware changes of software/firmware that had been out for many years.? Bugs were eradicated years ago and there has been no need to improve on it since. If it ain't broke it don't need fixing.... ? My original reply was LinuxCNC related.? ? Pathpilot is a commercial Tormach product and is also neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC. It is a Linux based system, as are Fanuc controllers.? ? Pathpilot was developed because neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC did what Tormach wanted, so they took the open source HAL from LinuxCNC as a basis for their own work. To counteract any licencing issues they had to release their software but cleverly limited it to some custom Mesa style boards made specifically for themselves.. I seem to remember they also bought out the company that made the boards to protect against clones. ? Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Steve Blackmore
Fanuc 21 firmware has been out since 2010 ish - any was just a development due to hardware changes of software/firmware that had been out for many years.? Bugs were eradicated years ago and there has been no need to improve on it since. If it ain't broke it don't need fixing.... ? My original reply was LinuxCNC related.? Pathpilot is a commercial Tormach product and is also neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC. It is a Linux based system, as are Fanuc controllers.? Pathpilot was developed because neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC did what Tormach wanted, so they took the open source HAL from LinuxCNC as a basis for their own work. To counteract any licencing issues they had to release their software but cleverly limited it to some custom Mesa style boards made specifically for themselves. I seem to remember they also bought out the company that made the boards to protect against clones. Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
开云体育I have no experience with Fanuc 21 controllers but I’ve never encountered any bug free software after over fifty years of computer usage. Congratulations! ? I’m sure that you understand why Tormach doesn’t exactly make an effort to ensure that you can use their free software on non-Tormach machines. On the other hand PathPilot runs on most any reasonably modern cheap PC and touch screen with no need to find an XT machine with a parallel port. ? BTW, the original question was regarding Mach3 and LinuxCNC rather than Fanuc controllers. ? ? From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 4:32 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC ? ? John Stevenson and I did look at Pathpilot when it first came out. At the same time we obtained a couple of stand alone panel mounted clone Fanuc 21 style lathe controllers. It took me little longer than a week to get one of the clone controls wired and working fully closed loop. It's still working now, never needed any bugs fixing as it didn't have any. It has the great advantage of NOT using pc hardware or cluttering the shop with a keyboard or mouse. Pathpilot looks very pretty but was an utter bastard to get it to work with non tormach hardware and we never fully sorted it. It was quickly abandoned to the trash and forgotten about until now.? ? As Dan noted - quite easy to piss off the Linux guru's - any criticism is taken as if you called their mother or granny a whore LOL? ? Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Steve Blackmore
John Stevenson and I did look at Pathpilot when it first came out. At the same time we obtained a couple of stand alone panel mounted clone Fanuc 21 style lathe controllers. It took me little longer than a week to get one of the clone controls wired and working fully closed loop. It's still working now, never needed any bugs fixing as it didn't have any. It has the great advantage of NOT using pc hardware or cluttering the shop with a keyboard or mouse. Pathpilot looks very pretty but was an utter bastard to get it to work with non tormach hardware and we never fully sorted it. It was quickly abandoned to the trash and forgotten about until now.? As Dan noted - quite easy to piss off the Linux guru's - any criticism is taken as if you called their mother or granny a whore LOL? Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
开云体育You didn’t include details of your problem but I suspect that a fix didn’t require changes to the code but merely a small tweak to the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) file that defines how LinuxCNC should interact with your specific hardware. Really the same as configuring Mach3 for your hardware. ? From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 12:48 PM To: mach1mach2cnc@... Subject: Re: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC ? ? ? I too had run EMC for a while but I ran into a problem with one of the inputs/outputs that was opposite of what a G540 could use. I went on the EMC forum and posted my problem. I mentioned that it was a software problem in that the program was looking for a certain state of one of the status pins. When I further researched it I saw it as only a minor software problem that should be easy to fix the state of that status pin. Well that apparently raised the hackles of the emc groups and they became very defensives and would not answer why the status pin had to have the state that they programmed. I had Terry and someone else support my claim that it would be a trivial software bug fix. But no they repeated wanted the G540 to have their hardware fixed. But the G540 as we all know works flawlessly with Mach3 and the port. Dan Mauch |
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
开云体育I used Mach3 for several years on my Tormach PCNC770. When Tormach released PathPilot (which is mostly LinuxCNC) 3 years ago I converted. There is absolutely no comparison between the two types of control software. LinuxCNC hasn’t crashed or randomly done funny things over the last 3 years, the user interface is very attractive with clean elements instead of the gaudy default colours of Mach3, touch screen operation is a delight, the tool table works reliably, soft limits work, I can transfer files to my machine over Ethernet and even surf the net while running a job, the GCode dialect supports named variables and conditional execution which is great for hand written code but most importantly bugs are fixed with updated releases several times a year rather than being ignored. In summary, I would even consider going back to Mach3. ? From: mach1mach2cnc@... [mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 12:32 PM To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc] Subject: Re: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC ? ? Hi John - It's some years ago now but I gave it a good test but gave up. I'm not a programmer or software developer or any other sort of guru so failed to get it to work reliably. Unless you know Linux really well - forget it. It seems to have been written by some clever people but for specific instances and hardware and if your machine or method of working didn't exactly match you were on your own and expected to modify or amend to suit yourself. The GUI interfaces were mostly appallingly bad too. ? A quick look a few minutes ago shows nothing much appears to have changed in years LOL... ? Steve Blackmore
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
? I too had run EMC for a while but I ran into a problem with one of the inputs/outputs that was opposite of what a G540 could use. I went on the EMC forum and posted my problem. I mentioned that it was a software problem in that the program was looking for a certain state of one of the status pins. When I further researched it I saw it as only a minor software problem that should be easy to fix the state of that status pin. Well that apparently raised the hackles of the emc groups and they became very defensives and would not answer why the status pin had to have the state that they programmed. I had Terry and someone else support my claim that it would be a trivial software bug fix. But no they repeated wanted the G540 to have their hardware fixed. But the G540 as we all know works flawlessly with Mach3 and the port.
Dan Mauch |
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Re: Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Steve Blackmore
Hi John - It's some years ago now but I gave it a good test but gave up. I'm not a programmer or software developer or any other sort of guru so failed to get it to work reliably. Unless you know Linux really well - forget it. It seems to have been written by some clever people but for specific instances and hardware and if your machine or method of working didn't exactly match you were on your own and expected to modify or amend to suit yourself. The GUI interfaces were mostly appallingly bad too. A quick look a few minutes ago shows nothing much appears to have changed in years LOL... Steve Blackmore
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Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
开云体育Anyone on this group who tried LinuxCNC for a while and then returned to using MACHx? ?If so, could you list the reasons why? Thanks John ? |
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Re: Mach3 Automatically reboots my PC
Yes I am running win 7 32 bits. So I have tried restoring the pc to an earlier date 7-24-19 hoping that would fix the issue. But it didn't. . I went ahead and installed the version of mach3 with the patch but neither solved the problem. So I will just have to use either pokeys57cnc, uc100 uc400 or the ESS when I wasnt to use my office pc to view a g code file.
Thanks anyway. Dan Mauch |