[SCzEngrgGroup]

Nate,

You can setup the prox sensors are limit switches, but I don't recommend it. They are easily triggered by chips, and will cause false limit trips. Without modifying the mounting, they will also limit travel to well below the machines physical limits. Better to just use them as home switches, and add separate limit switches, and/or use Mach3 soft limits.

Regards,
Ray L.

[FineLineAuto]

That makes sense. They seemed at least somewhat protected so I didn't think it would be a problem. Soft limits sound like a better option. What do you have your soft limits set at? I noticed that the Y axis bangs into the front chip tray mount before it reaches it's travel limits. Does the new stand let the y-axis travel the full way?


Nate
Fine Line Automation
Home - Fine Line Automation

[SCzEngrgGroup]

That makes sense. They seemed at least somewhat protected so I didn't think it would be a problem. Soft limits sound like a better option. What do you have your soft limits set at? I noticed that the Y axis bangs into the front chip tray mount before it reaches it's travel limits. Does the new stand let the y-axis travel the full way?


Nate
Fine Line Automation
Home - Fine Line Automation

Yes, the upgraded stands are a bit deeper. IIRC, at least a couple of inches was added. But I was still able to get full travel with the earlier stand by unbolting the front part of the bellows from the two brackets on the machine base, then bolting them to the front panel of the enclosure instead. I used bolts through the front plate of the bellows and the front panel of the enclosure to keep the bellows in place. It is fastened with knobs on the outside, so very easy to remove. You need to leave the two brackets on the base to support the bellows, and keep them from catching on the front of the base. This is all covered in my thread.

Regards,
Ray L.

[FineLineAuto]

Attachment 231170

Ray,

It's not the bellows cover that's hitting. In the picture above, you can see the to the bottom that the homing switch cover plate is right up against the front panel of the stand. That is at about 9.35" on the DRO readout, which means I have another 3" of travel thereabouts.

I wonder if this was a change that was made recently.


Nate
Fine Line Automation
Home - Fine Line Automation

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Nate,

That's very different from mine - not sure why....

BTW - FULL Y axis travel is 15"!

Regards,
Ray L.

[FineLineAuto]

Nate,

That's very different from mine - not sure why....

BTW - FULL Y axis travel is 15"!

Regards,
Ray L.

Ray,

The cover is very nice. It completely encapsulates the homing switches and has blocks underneath at the "Limits" to trigger the switch. I was thinking about how chips could easily find their way onto the switch with this configuration but wasn't coming up with much. There is an X-Axis cover on the back of the table as well. You can see the configuration in the picture. The homing switch sticks up well into the cavity.

Attachment 231176

[ram48]

I now get full Y axis travel on my NM 200
Here is a link to the thread I posted n here about a year ago.

.cnczone.com/forums/novakon-systems/178318-tray-extension.html

I was fairly easy and I had all the materials in the shop.
Ray Mc

[engnerdan]

FineLineAuto - Your PM box it full, I tired to send you a message this morning.

-Dan

[FineLineAuto]

So, I've been humming along on the machine for the last few months (I have pictures and video, haven't gotten around to posting), and then I hit a brick wall. Everything operated normally and I could I can run the mill normally for about 4 minutes before it sets both spindle enable and drive enable to false. Restarting Mach 3 OR cycling the power on the BOB allows me to run like normal for 4 minutes before it shuts down again.

First, a shout out to Ray for helping me troubleshoot this issue. He led me to the problem and I learned a lot about the torus pro bob in the process.


Here is what I was experiencing:

- The bob still reports a charge pump signal and Mach 3 thinks everything is fine. However, the bob sets spindle enable (active low) to 5v and drive enable (active low) to 2.43v. As a result, the dros on Mach still run but nothing moves.
- when the problem started, I briefly connected the machine to the internet to activate machstdmill. Windows installed some updates at that point. i first thought it might be that Mach 3 got screwed up because of the windows updates. However, I ruled this and other potential computer issues out because I tried the following and everytime I got the same failure to move drives or the spindle after 4 minutes:
1) installing a ESS in between the computer and bob.
2) installing a uc100 motion controller between the computer and bob.
3) reinstalling Mach 3
4) trying the original torus pro profile just in case MSM was screwed up
5) reinstalling windows and Mach 3 from scratch and trying the different boards again.

Ray then told me the BOB (specifically the PIC mcu on the bob) controls only three significant things:

1) Spindle Enable - This is controlled by pin 7 of the MCU - When pin 7 is LOW, the spindle is enabled
2) Drive Enable - This is controlled by pin 6 of the MCU - When pin 6 is HIGH, the drives are enabled
3) Tap Mode - This is controlled by pin 1 of the MCU - When Pin 1 is HIGH, Tap mode is enabled. However, I don't think this makes any difference on a Pro.

Turns out the PIC on my bob is failing in a weird way. Ray gave my instructions for removing the PIC and shunting the drive and spindle enable pins to active until I got the replacement board. The new boards switched to and ardunio which IMO was a very good design choice.

I had been humming along with the shunted setup for about a month now. John got me the board a few weeks ago and I got around to installing it tonight. I got it in and restored the old Mach 3 file I had before I started making changes for the shunts and I couldn't get the spindle to turn on. Well, 2 hours later I figured out there was a jumper on the board (see pic). Attachment 244696

When I moved the jumper to the left, the spindle started turning on both cw and ccw, but it was always running at max RPMs. I tried for a few hours to get the PWM signal right. I new I was getting a proper pwm signal because if I set the PWMBaseFreq setting low enough in Mach 3 I could see the rom ramp up and hold every few seconds. Ray suggested that I check the VC line going into the VFD for the analog voltage of the pwm. Well, I plugged the positive connection in my current input instead of into the voltage input and when I went to get a test voltage i blew the 5V rail on the new BOB.

Highly annoyed at myself and frustrated enough to quit for the night. Gonna reinstall my shunted setup in the morning.

[Novakon]

There is a lot to digest here.

First order of business is to get you another BOB in the mail and then we will start with a new copy of mach3 without the MSN upgrade. Once we have the mill going with the new BOB, new mach3 load and a clean XML file, we should have a good starting point. MSN modifies the XML file, so we are currently uncertain of it's affects on the operation of Mach3 at this point.

Regards,
Novakon Team

[FineLineAuto]

There is a lot to digest here.

First order of business is to get you another BOB in the mail and then we will start with a new copy of mach3 without the MSN upgrade. Once we have the mill going with the new BOB, new mach3 load and a clean XML file, we should have a good starting point. MSN modifies the XML file, so we are currently uncertain of it's affects on the operation of Mach3 at this point.

Regards,
Novakon Team

Just wanted to add that Novakon has been awesome in their support up to this point. I have been working with John and Ray offline on this.

I don't necessarily think MSM does anything to the port/pin configuration. When I first got the mill that was the first thing I installed and it didn't affect the configuration at all. Just the screens and macros associated with them changed.

I will clean Mach 3 and MSM off and reinstall.

[Tkamsker]

Question would the Bob work with linuxcnc ?

[FineLineAuto]

Question would the Bob work with linuxcnc ?

Yes, it should. The pins would need to be mapped (assuming there is a diagram somewhere that will give you the mapping) because I don't think anyone has a native config file for it.

I might explore that again in the future (it's been a while since I played with it), but for me it has a couple of things going against it:
* my post processor would need to be checked and retweaked for it.
* I would need to rerun all of my production files through the post processor.
* time to install is time I don't currently have
* I need would need a different control setup. The UC100 nor the smoothsteppers work with linuxcnc because linuxcnc wants to be the boss and generate all the pulse trains. The Mesa boards are real nice, but it requires me to swap components.
* not sure on the current status of probing routines for it. MSM is really good at that. I could implement routines but the time to do so is a lot.

Good thought, not entirely out of the question at some point. Just not right for right now.

[UniqueMachining]

Nate

FYI,
MSM does use its own xml file. If you return to Mach3 (less MSM) you will need a fresh xml.
Make sure you apply any changes you made to the MSM xml.

John

[FineLineAuto]

So, the road to recovery was thankfully a whole lot easier than I initially thought. Turns out I didn't blow the board, just a fuse on the 5V rail coming from the computer supply. It's on a fuse holder on the wire harness and was hidden behind the board, so I didn't see it till I pulled the board off. I'll take $0.65 over $200 any day.

John gave me the Mach 3 XML file for the new bob. That helped me to solve my max speed issue. It's was a combination of 2 problems:

1) the new rev 5 board had the board logic level active low instead of active high like the old rev 5 board. So, when I did M3 S600, instead of a PWM signal that was 90% off I got one that was 90% on.

2) for whatever reason the pwm output parameters are off. Once I got problem one sorted out, I learned that the rpm was running about 1.75 times what it's programmed for. This masked problem one. If the pwm output was correct, when I had the logic reversed I should have seen 6000 at spindle speed 0 and 0 at spindle speed 6000. But because the pwm is so off, I never got the duty cycle low enough to go below 6000.

So, problem number 2 essentially boils down to me seeing 1000rpms on Mach 3 and seeing 1750 at the spindle. I didn't know how to properly shape the wave form for Mach so I cheated and configured the spindle pulley setup to go from 150 to 11000 and that did the trick. Within 50rpm on the lower end and 150 rpm on the higher end. What's happening here is that 11000 rpm is now a 100% duty cycle, so 6000 is now only around a 60% duty cycle. Is there a proper way to do it?

Oh, and for those mentioning MSM. Really all that is does is provide a new screen set. Without uninstalling anything, I was able to take the XML file john provided, load it, and then just change the screen set to MSM to load it. Yes, technically it does change the XML, but it doesn't change any of the ports and pins or general config setups so it's pretty safe to load.

[engnerdan]

Attachment 231170

Ray,

It's not the bellows cover that's hitting. In the picture above, you can see the to the bottom that the homing switch cover plate is right up against the front panel of the stand. That is at about 9.35" on the DRO readout, which means I have another 3" of travel thereabouts.

I wonder if this was a change that was made recently.


Nate
Fine Line Automation
Home - Fine Line Automation

I just stumbled across this picture from 4 months ago. My Torus pro is the same way. Actually the way mine came I only have about 12 inches of y travel out of the crate. I had to remove some limiter screws in order to get to the 15" they claim. There is no mention of that anywhere in the manual. But now I have to come up with a solution to the limit switch bar hitting like this photo shows. I think I am going to drill new mounting holes for it to move the cast iron bar back.

[FineLineAuto]

I just stumbled across this picture from 4 months ago. My Torus pro is the same way. Actually the way mine came I only have about 12 inches of y travel out of the crate. I had to remove some limiter screws in order to get to the 15" they claim. There is no mention of that anywhere in the manual. But now I have to come up with a solution to the limit switch bar hitting like this photo shows. I think I am going to drill new mounting holes for it to move the cast iron bar back.

I shot a video of the mod I did to move the track back. I'll post it shortly. At this point though I am thinking about ditching the inductive proximity switches and installing mechanical switches.

In other news, here's what I was milling today:

[MRM RCModels]

Sweet! What machine is it going into?

[FineLineAuto]

Sweet! What machine is it going into?

It's going into a custom 5'x10' cnc router we made for a customer. NEMA 34 motors, 1200 oz-in with leadshine digital dsp drivers.

Panels took about 40 minutes total to machine. I think I can get it down a little.

[bill south]

Nate;
When you do the limit switch mod, would it be possible to shoot and post some pix of the upgrade. I need to add limit switches to my machine but haven't had and fun time in the shop lately so any help up front will be appreciated.
Thanks.
Bill