[hollyfeneht]

the machine is set to continious jog, where in the program can i play around with the acceleration or parameter settings?

[awerby]

You can change the accelleration and velocity settings in Mach's Configuration/Motor Tuning panel. There isn't any universal setting that works with every setup; how it behaves depends on your motors, controller, computer, and the kernal speed you're running at. But once you're in there, you can select a motor (X comes up first, by default) and change the settings either graphically by dragging with the mouse, or by entering numbers in the boxes. Generally, if the motors sound bad (etchy?) it's because they're either going too fast or too slow. Try the effect of different accelleration and velocity settings by pressing the up-down arrow keys. When the motors seem to go the fastest and smoothest, write down the settings and then derate them by about 15%. This gives a margin of safety that will avoid shutdowns due to the motors getting ahead of themselves. The graph should look like a mesa -sloping sides and flat on top. If it looks like a volcano, the action will be squashy - too little accelleration. If it's like a rectangle, then motions will probably be too abrupt. Press "save axis settings" to save what you did, then go on to the next axis. On the Taig, the X and Y settings should approximately match, but Z wants to go a bit slower. A is will look altogether different, since the units measured are degrees, not inches or mm. But you can tune it the same way.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com