[Tom Kay]

Hi;

I have very old driver boards from Dan Mauch's Camtronics. These were solder-yourself kits, and I am trying to get them working. Nowadays Dan doesn't offer driver kits, he just sells Gecko's like a lot of other supply places.

One issue I'm running into is motors that want to run, but run very rough, or just twitch like crazy when I run a bench test. I use Mach3 software, and the 25 KHz pulse stream on my computer looks good in Mach3 Driver Test. I'm convinced I've configured and tuned properly. If I hadn't, I don't think I'd get any motor movement at all. There seems to be no velocity or acceleration that allows the motors to run smoothly, and I've tried LOTS of settings.

As Marriss (Gecko) has mentioned, I may have the 8 wire steppers connected wrong. I'll investigate that today with an oscilloscope at work. I wish I could take the scope home, but I can't.

But Dan Mauch mentioned that my parallel port may not be outputting a 5 Volt signal. His old kits need at least 4 volts to "see" the incoming signals. When I put a voltmeter on pin 2 and ground of the DB-25 connector, I got 3.3volts when I did a fast X-axis jog.

My reason for posting this, is, to find out a good way to reliably read the DB-25 output voltage correctly. Maybe the signal was 5 volts, but because it's providing very brief pulses, the Voltmeter just sees it as 3.3 volts (maybe the meter samples too slowly).

So, is there one pin of the parallel port output that stays at constant, max voltage at all times? Or can I configure one pin to do this? Maybe, set a pin as "E-Stop" or "Enable" and use the configure window in Mach3 to set it "active high?"

My computer is a Hewlett Packard XW4300 work station, so not the newest thing around. Or is there another way to determine if the parallel port really outputs at leats 4 or 5 volts?

Thanks for any help. Tom.

[UUU]

On the spindle setup tab, in Ports and Pins, you could enable the Flood coolant relay - and set that to one of the output#. then on the Output signals tab, set which pin you want that output to go to.

[Tom Kay]

So the flood coolant relay would be enabled the whole time you want flood, and putting out a constant max volt signal? When it's switched off, then the voltage would drop to zero, or almost zero?

That sounds great. That might be just what I'm looking for.

Thanks uuu, can't wait to try it.

Tom.