[conveyor1]

Hello All-

Been doing my best to work my machines problems out but this one kind of has me stumped.

I am radius profiling 2 sides a 2" thick piece in z with multiple passes in x stepping y over in .01 increments to obtain a smooth curve.

The problem i am having is that as the cutter works across y it isnt square to x.
The opposite end is parallel to it but it is out approx. .625 in 14" Granted that only works out to about .0002 per pass(3100 passes)...but i cant for the life of me figure out why its doing it or how to solve it.
I started in cv mode for speed, switched to exact stop mode-no difference
set my speed to half and accel to a crawl- no difference.

I could accept it being lost steps if it didnt do exactly the same thing every time, and it didnt cut a perfect parallelogram.


the code was generated from sketchup through freemill but it is a pretty basic program length aside.


ive cut the piece 3 times and the exact same problem every time.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

[michaelthomas]

I had a similar problem at one time which turned out to be a slow optocoupler on the breakout board I was using. I did a lot of raster work, and every direction change it would lose a step.....resulting in some parallelogram type crapola, too.

It took a hell of a long time to figure out, and I never would have on my own. Steve Stallings from PMDX helped me out a bunch on that one......and it wasn't even one of his breakout boards. Very nice guy.

I replaced the BOB with a PMDX 122, and all was well for me.

I sold the machine to someone else, and a similar problem reared its ugly head after switching computers.

He eventually figured out he wasn't getting a very good pulse output via the parallel port on his computer and put in a smoothstepper to solve the issue.....which it did. I know quite a few people that have had this same trouble as well.

I wish you luck tracking it down.....it can sure be frustrating.

I have abandoned parallel port and am using KFLOP on everything now. Absolutely no troubles on several machines.....and one of them is a crazy accurate cylindrical grinder (StuderS35) that needs to periodically hold .00005" in diameter. Most often it only needs to hold .0002" or so......but KFLOP is always rock solid.

[EL34]

This may be exactly what I have been chasing for a while

I have several jobs that mill circle shapes

After cutting several circles the X axis will be out .005 and it keeps getting worse as the job goes on.

The X axis always goes out in the X+ direction

I have been having to stop, reset X to zero and then continue again

The Y and Z axis are always right on zero
It's not my motors, or driver boards
The X axis is a ball screw and there is no bearing slop

Len at Probotix suggested I uninstall Mach3 and then delete all the left over files in the Mach3 folder (except for the mach3Mill.xml and license file

Reboot and then re-install mach3

I am running back to back jobs (cutting air) to test it today.
After a bunch of repeating the same job that gave me fits before, the
X axis is out by .0104 and y is only out by .0006

So X is still creeping a bit but not as bad as it was

Still not happy with this result, but it is better than it was
I am not famailiar with other methods besides using the parallel port

Where can I read up on the different choices available?