[AWJENNIN]

Hello to all ! I am new at this, and have just finished building my first CNC. Its a CSMIO/IP-M based machine with AppliedMotion stepper controllers, and small superior electric motors. I have THK linear bearings and ballscrews for all axis movement. There are home switches and limit++ switches.
I have set up limits & homing. Soft limits are in place, and "REF ALL HOME" work's as expected. While manually jogging at 100% (via laptop keyboard), everything works smoothly. No issues - I have spent a lot of time trying to get it tuned.

Here's my issue:
When I manually navigate to a random position and then press "GOTO ZERO", the steppers take off - but then issues occur. The steppers will get up to full speed, but then randomly, they will ALL stop at exactly the same time... and then continue again. run, stop, run ... etc. this may happen a few times during the "goto home" sequence, and it is very abrupt. They dont seem to loose their position, and it appears to get back to 0,0,0 accurately. Sometimes, because of the abrupt starts and stops, cogging will occur, in which case it will loose its position and wont make it back to 0,0,0

Anyone with experience able to get me pointed in the right direction? I feel that this might be a software based issue????


thanks for your time and consideration!

[port_huon]

Check that you don't have any software running on the PC that doesn't need to be there.
I had a similar issue that turned out to be an anti-virus package. Removing it fixed the problem.

[AWJENNIN]

Thank you for your quick response - The laptop is a core2duo + bare-bones windows xp. Nothing extra is running - although it may be time for a reload!
I will give that a try, and report back in the next day or so.

In the interim I have a stepper motor that is scorching hot - x & y measure ~60C, and the Z is around 150C... the motor controllers are all cool to the touch, but I will still need to isolate whether I have a bad motor or bad controller.

[AWJENNIN]

OK, so.. so far things seem better. No true tests yet, but "goto home" has had better results. I reloaded WinXP sp3, and haven't let microsoft ruin it yet (by installing the mind-numbing number of updates they try to push through). After all, it doesn't connect to the net, so who cares. I got the pc info wrong too - its only a "dual-core" laptop, not the core2duo i thought. It only has a gig of ram too - some more definitely wouldn't hurt!

I will continue to test, but I haven't seen the glitches yet! Also, the "lost-communication" error I was getting between mach3 & my csmio controller has NOT occurred since the reload - which is fantastic news!

Thanks for the advise - I will try to update once more once I get some more testing done

[AWJENNIN]

OK - just solved it. The laptop is no star, but definitely good enough for mach3. I had the CSMIO-IP/M cnc controller running to a (s%*&y) cisco/linksys wireless router, and then connected to it via the laptop's wireless.

Just swapped in a hardwire connection to the router, and its working like greased magic. yay!



I should probably swap out the junky wireless with something more beefy (ubiquity bullet radio, maybe!)... or just use hardwire