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Mach 4 motion controller boards
开云体育? Can someone point me to a listing of current motion controllers that work with Mach 4, please. ? Sent from my Atari 2600 Regards, -Joemac ? |
开云体育i don't know about a list but i can't think of anything better
than ESS together with a parallel port breakout board like the
PMDX On 4/2/2021 7:11 PM, Joe Macmurchie
wrote:
-- Best regards, Spencer Chase 67550 Bell Springs Rd. Garberville, CA 95542 Postal service only. Laytonville, CA 95454 UPS only. Spencer@... (425) 791-0309 |
开云体育Ditto! I just spent the day downloading and reading all the Mach4
manual. I've been running Mach3 on my converted Smithy with my custom CNC
conversion and home designed controller, ....planning to stay with 3!? I guess that's a sign I'm getting older (and lazy?) ptegler On 4/2/2021 11:05 PM,
spencer@... wrote:
-- Paul Tegler ptegler@... |
开云体育I am old too and do not like to learn new stuff unless there is
likely to be a big payoff. my particulars might be different from
most. i make about 150 small parts in a session. the program is
starting and stopping as many times. i think i have learned just about everything i could screw up but
then i find another way. no more short cuts for me. that said, i think i know the difference between my fucking up or
the machine fucking up and the control program fucking up. i
devised all sorts of means of correcting what i now believe were
minor hiccups in mach3. i know that windows makes it very
difficult to write this sort of program. mach3 was written for XP
and although it still runs on win 10 i believe there may be some
instances where mach3 is just not fast enough smart enough or
whatever enough to work with all the crap win 10 is trying to do.
i have my machine pared down to the almost minimum that will still
allow windows to run. no internet no programs at all running in
the background and all unnecessary services disabled. i will know better when i have made 1000 parts but so far after
75 i have had absolutely no position drift or random moves that
can break tools and damage the machine. running the same program
on the same machine with mach3 i was constantly on the estop ready
to catch some stray move or stall and had to constantly make minor
corrections for lost steps. at this point my axis are very smooth
and i use fairly slow acceleration and do not insist on trying to
run as fast as possible. making the 75 parts i had absolutely no
corrections to make no stray moves, never had to estop once except
when i did something really stoopid. with mach3 i would have
estopped and restarted mach3 several times in 75 parts and would
have been constantly making corrections to the x axis. no idea the
x axis, when this is the easiest on a three axis router. at this
point i really don't care to figure out whey mach3 behaves so
badly compared to mach4, just glad i switched, i have 3800 parts
to make. i almost have the confidence to leave the machine to do other
things in the shop. i am going to wire my spindle controller to
stop the gecko drives when it faults. that would have fixed the
stupid thing i did yesterday. i live in fire country and had to
evacuate twice last summer. it was a total bitch not being a young
strong guy. so now everything of values is on wheeled carts. the
router is mounted to a steel cart and i had not decided where to
mount the spindle controller so it was just sitting there. then i
realized that there was a place to improve the wiring to the
controller and the improvement allowed the controller to be pulled
by a wire and knocked off the stand. that killed the spindle but
the axis were still moving and i was not fast enough with the
estop. now the controller is solidly bolted down and tomorrow will
be the fault estopping. i also bought a single relay remote control that i can hang as a
pendant around my neck for when i wander away from the running
machine. i know exactly what the noise should be for a part that
is being cut properly. hopefully i can act fast enough if i hear
something wrong but my guess is that there will be very few times
when this is necessary. i have run repeated axis moves checking with the dial gauge and
jogging or using MDI or running simple programs with repeated
moves and return to home always end up in the same place. it is
only when i am running a sub over and over and over that i get
strange behavior from mach3. the random moves (which corrected
themselves) are a total mystery but happened fairly regularly with
mach3. my guess is a problem with the mach3 driver for ESS? did
not experience this with mach4 yet. My guess is that the drift in
mach3 is due to some rounding error or ??? when the sub repeats
over and over. I am also using offsets and again a guess is that
all this interaction together with some obscure bug in mach3 and
probably some not great gcode programming results in
unreliability. i have not had to make a single correction on the x
axis running mach4. if that were not enough there are so many improvements in mach4
that i am just starting to discover them. i can easily do things
like MDI without screwing up as i repeatedly did with mach3. the
program is just more friendly. i have lost patience with work
arounds and faking things. i just want to get the work done. On 4/2/2021 9:04 PM, Paul Tegler via
groups.io wrote:
-- Best regards, Spencer Chase 67550 Bell Springs Rd. Garberville, CA 95542 Postal service only. Laytonville, CA 95454 UPS only. Spencer@... (425) 791-0309 |
开云体育Well i'll agree on that... I'm still running Mach 3 on an XP machine for the very reasons you mention. Ops sys is stripped of everything save the bare essentials to get the environment up and running.? So I don't have any issues with the env adding/dropping random interrupts. Mach 3 gets full attention of the sys all the time. No other app grabbing background ops. I do though run Vectrics VCarve Pro at the same time. But both apps only interact if I try to edit the gcode while that same file is still loaded in Mach3 ptegler
On 4/3/2021 2:34 AM,
spencer@... wrote:
-- Paul Tegler ptegler@... |
Joe Macmurchie