Hi Lester
Have you checked the parallel port output voltage? A lot of laptops
and modern desktops now seem to put out only 3.8V instead of the 5V
your driver board probably needs.
Cheers
Dave
--- In mach1mach2cnc@..., Lester Caine <lester@...>
wrote:
Right guys ( and galls? )
Spent some time yesterday playing with a TaigCNC machine and
comparing
Mach3 with the DOS package that normally drives it. The original
control
program is running on an old machine that would probably not even
load
W2k so I had taken along an ITX box with W2k already installed.
Only
problem is that it is an 800MHz C3 processor, but since this is
intended
to be an embedded computer to go with the machine nothing else was
installed on it.
Operation from the DOS program is smooth and clean, but running
the same
tests in Mach3 give a number of problems. Even slowing things
down,
running just 25kHz and slower feed rates we have a
decided 'pattern' to
the noise from the stepper, like something is sticking every
couple of
seconds, while the DOS has none even at a faster rate.
Is this likely to be due to the fact that the processor is not
fast
enough? Neither of my laptops have parallel ports, so I could not
hook
them up, and the desk machines are rack mounted, so until I can
get a
machine over here it's difficult to try a faster processor. What
*IS*
the slowest processor speed that will work cleanly - or is the
less than
smooth pulse generation a 'facet' of using windows? Given the
quality of
work that the machine CAN produce, any pattern to the axis
movement is
likely to affect the surface finish.
Ideally I would like to include a 1.2 or 1.5Ghz ITX based
processor with
each machine but I am wondering if that will work, or if I am
stuck with
just running DOS and leaving Mach until the G100 or something
similar is
a cost effective alternative :(
I will leave the other problems until I can run things with a
faster
processor ;)
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services -
Model Engineers Digital Workshop -
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc. -
