[morvornagh]

Hi there,

I have searched around for some potential troubleshooting for this question before posting here but with no luck.

BTW - Please don't get frustrated with the description of my problem I am not an expert but I would describe myself as a new-ish CNC user.

I have been using a Deepgroove CNC Mill with a gecko g540 drive and Mach3 on a dedicated WinXP m/c and parallel ports for 6 months now and I have been cutting parts regularly in Aluminium with great success.

However this week I unexpectedly started to run into some problems and I wanted to see if anyone could suggest a solution or at least some trouble shooting steps to follow. (I have searched around on the internet but with no luck - but am due to the nature of the issue I think it is a problem with gecko g540 driver - although I could easily be wrong).

My issue started yesterday I was squaring a piece on my machine and the x axis motor stopped right as I was jogging from left to right. When it did this all motors stopped responding to the jog controls. My Mach 3 interface still showed that the machine was moving but there was no movement on the motors...

I then restarted the machine and all seemed to be fine again.

I jogged to the zero position loaded my g code and started the cycle. However as soon as the motor got under load (i.e. started to cut) the motor stopped - again the mach 3 interface showed movement but all three motors had stopped responding. It now does this every time I try to cut a piece.

Has anyone experienced this before.

As I said I use a dedicated XP machine with parallel ports which has been working fine up to now and I dont have any other background processes running in parallel.

Any help gratefully appreciated.

Thanks
M

[bhurts]

First thing to do is check all your wires and connectors and make sure nothing is lose or disconnected. Check your parallel port cable for broken wires or loose connections. Also check your power supply to the motors to make sure it's not dropping out.

Ben

[morvornagh]

Thanks Ben,

I did the proverbial switch it off and on again as well as checking the wires (which is where my mind went first also) but I think I may have located a potential (very simple and somewhat embarrassing) source of the problem.

I don't know why or how but my motors tuning and config got changed in Mach 3.

So retuned and things seem to be working well so far. Will keep this updated but it seems an odd outcome for the machine when it is just out of tune!?
M