Gentlemen:
I am seeing some really strange occurances with MACH2 4.0a. I
upgraded from RC 5 to 3.X and the CV thing caused jerky movements.
Art made it so we could turn off the angle discrimination in CV with
4.0a which took me back to nice smooth full speed movements. Now
with 4.0a in place I get intermittent problems with the pulse
engine. I can run a job perfect then move the head to load material
or just sometimes walk away from the machine for a few minutes of
sitting still (no DC on the motors) and it goes into a semi-frozen
state on movement. There are no errors, no e-stop, and all screen
functions appear normal but it refuses to move (no jog or program or
MDI response) and nothing you do will change that. It almost acts as
if the unit is in the state where the MDI screen has focus and no
other movement is allowed. To further the mystery sometimes if you
try to jog or do an MDI command (with or without feedrate command)
the table will start to move ever so slow at about 2 IPM and the
DRO's will track. The speed DRO shows 2 instead of the 160 the
velocity is set for. Stop, Rewind, Run all work but change nothing.
Only cure is to close MACH2 and reopen (loosing position info) and
then it's happy for a while.
I am suspecting something with the computer itself but I hate to
start ripping the PC apart if it is software. Nothing has changed in
the PC setup from previous versions. This is a WIN2000 machine and I
have done a manual install of the MACH2 driver twice to eliminate the
possibility of multiple versions of the MACH2 Driver being defined.
Nothing is running in the background but bare services and the NIC
(set to manual 100 mb half duplex).
The reason for the post is to see if anybody has ever seen this
problem on any version. My next step is to swap out the dedicated PC
running the table.
BTW this is a plasma app and I use the THC function at all times. I
don't know if that has anything to do with it, although I have tried
turning off the THC enable between runs and the problems still occurs.
What a time for Art to be in Mexico! Oh well, he deserves it, but
Murphy's Law will rear it's ugly head.
Tom C
