I have recently tried to upgrade my old Bridgeport Series II to use a KFLOP control board with Mach3
I've had the machine for a couple of years now with Mach3 and a 3 axis controller board from Automation Technology Inc (3 Axis CNC USB Card Mach3 200KHz Breakout Board Stepper Motor | Stepper Motor Driver | CNC Router | Laser Machine | 3D Printers For Sale), and a HuanYang VFD. It worked fairly well, but I wanted to improve performance add a 4th axis, and add encoders because it would sometimes stall and then continue machining where it wasn't supposed to.
Anyway, after some searching I heard about Dynomotion and was impressed with their KFLOP board and bought one. I have been having quite a bit of fun going through it and getting everything running. I made a simple custom breakout board to isolate the inputs and have slowly been getting it going. After reading through the forum about MPGs, I learned that my existing wireless "Mach3 MPG" (from China) wasn't going to work very well so I got a wired MPG on ebay (Universal CNC 4 Axis MPG Pendant Handwheel & Emergency Stop for Siemens US UPS | eBay) and figured out how to wire it up to the KFLOP Board. I didn't have enough inputs left on my Break-Out Board so I built a little micro controller circuit to go between the MPG Pendant and KFLOP, It translates the selector switches into a serial word and implements a two wire serial interface which I could easily decode in the KFLOP board.
After a bit of a learning curve, I have the MPG running very smoothly. But there seems to be some problems with it working with Mach3. When I am simply jogging around with the MPG the DROs on Mach3 seem to be working great. But when I load a gcode program that's when things start to go wrong. If I start up Mach 3 and use the keyboard to jog around and then <Ref All Home> then run my little test program (generated by Fusion 360) it runs fine. But if I try to use the MPG to move an axis, (like I wanted to zero the tool length) then when I push Cycle Start the Z-axis moves to the home position and than rapidly back to the zero position. And then the program won't run and I have to hit the Stop button (not the ESTOP) rewind and then try again, sometimes it will run the second time sometimes it wont. I'm sure that I've got something wrong in my Kflop program and the MPG section is fighting the Mach3 commands or something, But I've been all over the code and I can't seem to see what is wrong. So any help would be appreciated!
I posted some videos of what it is doing on YouTube if anyone is interested:
https://youtu.be/pBSB_iq-qhw
https://youtu.be/HpNIY_zlOWQ
https://youtu.be/YgbecT95j_Q
I'm including a zip file of the KFLOP Code.
I would really like to get this working well in Mach3, I've been using it for a couple of years now and I've grown used to it. I am using the Mach3 VFD-Drive-by-royaumedeole.fr to drive the VFD. I have a 6 pole hall effect pickup on the spindle which I use to read the spindle speed. That all seems to be working very well. I was able to re-write the mach3 probing routines, and they were working well until I added the MPG code. Now if I try to probe after using the MPG it sometimes goes in the wrong direction. Again if I only use the keyboard in Mach3 to jog, then everything seems to be working OK.
Thanks for any advice!
Dan M.