[sewerzuk]

Hello everybody!

First post here on CNCzone.
A bit about me:
I'm a bit of a metalworking hobbyist; I have a lathe and milling machine, ironworker, tubing bender, and several welders in my shop. I spend a bit of time with the TIG welder making non-structural brackets, braces, etc. for my construction business. I also do a bit of automotive welding/repair. I'm an ex-Navy Nuclear Electronics Technician and have a solid background in electronics, and continue to use those skills on and off. I have a good deal of electronics test equipment in my shop, including an oscilloscope. I am also a reasonably skilled computer user; I used to be the network administrator for a LAN on the USS John C Stennis, and owned my own PC repair and consulting business for a few years. I can muddle my way through Solidworks and Autocad, but am far from proficient at either program. I have a basic understanding of CNC hardware and software, but really need some help from more experienced people in this field.

I have a friend that owns a 5x10 plasma table and I have been fortunate enough to be able to use it when needed. It has been enough to give me a very basic entry-level understanding into CNC. Last year I purchased my own 4x8 CNC plasma table. It's a budget machine, but was set up well and working in a daily production environment. I paid next to nothing for it; the Powermax 1100 alone was worth more than what I paid for the entire setup. I fired it up and did a bit of playing around with it, but I knew that I wanted to do some upgrades and modifications. I haven't had time to work on it this summer, but now that winter is around the corner my weekends and evenings will allow some extra free time. So, I'm looking for some advice! I don't plan to use the table for any kind of production work; it will strictly be a hobby-type project that will help me to build my CAD skills and learn more about CNC. Here's a short video I threw together of the machine right after I bought it:

https://youtu.be/mI-VzClAdF4

I would like to accomplish a few things with this table:

1. Add water trays to limit the smoke/dust/etc. in my shop. I already have most of the material for this...but haven't finished building yet.
2. Add automatic torch height control
3. Get rid of the 486/66 and use my shop PC for control.
4. Upgrade my motion control board; maybe smoothstepper? Some other interface board?
5. Purchase some new motion control and CAM software; Mach3/4 and sheetcam is my current plan

I'm willing to spend some time and $$ on making this table work reliably. I really don't know that much about CNC yet, so any advice on my project would be greatly appreciated. If you were in my shoes, how would you proceed?
Thanks in advice for your help!

[PalmaMachine]

Hi, you should check out CandCNC. They have a web site with all their electronic packages and DTHC . I used their stuff and they are really on the ball if you get stuck with a problem. Call Tom he will steer you in the right direction.

[sewerzuk]

Hi, you should check out CandCNC. They have a web site with all their electronic packages and DTHC . I used their stuff and they are really on the ball if you get stuck with a problem. Call Tom he will steer you in the right direction.

Thanks, I will give Tom a call today.

I went ahead and ordered the ethernet smoothstepper and a power supply; I figured I would try to set that up with my existing motors and drives. That way I can get rid of that old 486 and start using my laptop. Instead of re-engineering the whole thing at once, I'll take it one step at a time.

Step 1: Get the smoothstepper installed and running with mach3 on my laptop.

[PalmaMachine]

With your prior experience,you will probably be up and running in no time. Read the DTHC manual, that one part of my CNC bloodletting has been the toughest part of the whole deal. I called their help line a couple of times, then discovered had I read and understood the instructions , all would have gone well. Be sure to check back to the download page of their website often, as you will find new firmware and other updates. Checkout another forum called Plasmaspider, bunch of really savy plasma cutters there also. I use an xbox game controller for an oh sh#t that did not go well safety stop! sure has saved me from some bad wrecks. I have cut some art type stuff just for fun, but really built mine to cut out parts, just cut out a pintle hitch plate for my tandem axle dump truck from 1" , worked really well, I would never have cut it as precise by hand.
Have fun.
Regards, Ken

[xjdubber]

just wondering have you looked at some of the other options out there, linux cnc, eding cnc, dynomotion, and many others? I used to really like mach, but with my last couple of impressions of it would not use it anymore.

[sewerzuk]

just wondering have you looked at some of the other options out there, linux cnc, eding cnc, dynomotion, and many others? I used to really like mach, but with my last couple of impressions of it would not use it anymore.

Not really; I have used Mach 3 before and felt comfortable with it...so I just decided to stick with it. I'm always open to suggestions though...if I get frustrated with Mach3 I'll do some digging on alternatives.
I already have the ethernet smoothstepper board set up but haven't had the time to run the machine yet. I will probably have time to do some test cuts within the week; I'll post some updates here when I have it up and running.

[dyode]

Hello everybody!

First post here on CNCzone.
A bit about me:
I'm a bit of a metalworking hobbyist; I have a lathe and milling machine, ironworker, tubing bender, and several welders in my shop. I spend a bit of time with the TIG welder making non-structural brackets, braces, etc. for my construction business. I also do a bit of automotive welding/repair. I'm an ex-Navy Nuclear Electronics Technician and have a solid background in electronics, and continue to use those skills on and off. I have a good deal of electronics test equipment in my shop, including an oscilloscope. I am also a reasonably skilled computer user; I used to be the network administrator for a LAN on the USS John C Stennis, and owned my own PC repair and consulting business for a few years. I can muddle my way through Solidworks and Autocad, but am far from proficient at either program. I have a basic understanding of CNC hardware and software, but really need some help from more experienced people in this field.

I have a friend that owns a 5x10 plasma table and I have been fortunate enough to be able to use it when needed. It has been enough to give me a very basic entry-level understanding into CNC. Last year I purchased my own 4x8 CNC plasma table. It's a budget machine, but was set up well and working in a daily production environment. I paid next to nothing for it; the Powermax 1100 alone was worth more than what I paid for the entire setup. I fired it up and did a bit of playing around with it, but I knew that I wanted to do some upgrades and modifications. I haven't had time to work on it this summer, but now that winter is around the corner my weekends and evenings will allow some extra free time. So, I'm looking for some advice! I don't plan to use the table for any kind of production work; it will strictly be a hobby-type project that will help me to build my CAD skills and learn more about CNC. Here's a short video I threw together of the machine right after I bought it:

https://youtu.be/mI-VzClAdF4

I would like to accomplish a few things with this table:

1. Add water trays to limit the smoke/dust/etc. in my shop. I already have most of the material for this...but haven't finished building yet.
2. Add automatic torch height control
3. Get rid of the 486/66 and use my shop PC for control.
4. Upgrade my motion control board; maybe smoothstepper? Some other interface board?
5. Purchase some new motion control and CAM software; Mach3/4 and sheetcam is my current plan

I'm willing to spend some time and $$ on making this table work reliably. I really don't know that much about CNC yet, so any advice on my project would be greatly appreciated. If you were in my shoes, how would you proceed?
Thanks in advice for your help!

This is my first post - Have you decided on Smooth Stepper? I am also rebuilding a CNC table, and I have all but decided on Smooth Stepper, A local Smooth Stepper distributor strongly recommended the Ethernet version and not the USB version for plasma, have you decided USB/Ethernet?

[sewerzuk]

This is my first post - Have you decided on Smooth Stepper? I am also rebuilding a CNC table, and I have all but decided on Smooth Stepper, A local Smooth Stepper distributor strongly recommended the Ethernet version and not the USB version for plasma, have you decided USB/Ethernet?

I had to go with some kind of external motion control board because every one of my current PC's are 64 bit systems, including my shop computer and my laptop. Mach3 won't run the parallel interface unless it is a 32 bit system (I suppose I could run it inside of a virtual machine, but the smoothstepper just seemed like a better solution).
I bought the ethernet version; the ethernet interface works better for my plans, but it also has an extra parallel port for future expansion.
I have it mounted in a box external to my stepper motor drives; it is all wired up, but I haven't had the time to set it all up in mach 3 and try it out. Hopefully one evening this week.

[dyode]

I had to go with some kind of external motion control board because every one of my current PC's are 64 bit systems, including my shop computer and my laptop. Mach3 won't run the parallel interface unless it is a 32 bit system (I suppose I could run it inside of a virtual machine, but the smoothstepper just seemed like a better solution).
I bought the ethernet version; the ethernet interface works better for my plans, but it also has an extra parallel port for future expansion.
I have it mounted in a box external to my stepper motor drives; it is all wired up, but I haven't had the time to set it all up in mach 3 and try it out. Hopefully one evening this week.

Hoping all goes well for you, My concern in my design is managing EM interference from the plasma arc, I have some long wire runs so I intend to use shielded twisted pairs of for driver to stepper motor connections with shield grounded at driver end only. I would like to hear about any issues you run into when testing with plasma cutter on.

[sewerzuk]

I managed to put in a couple of hours on the CNC table yesterday; I installed both Mach3 and Mach4. I tried to set everything up in Mach3 first as I had a little bit of prior experience with it but it repeatedly locked up, seemingly at random. Each time required a restart of Mach3 and a power cycle on the smoothstepper. I was able to get it to communicate with the smoothstepper, but every time I tried to make any settings changes it would freeze. I could have spent some time to figure it out, but decided to set up Mach4 instead. That went off without a problem. I followed the Mach4 setup video on the Warp9 website and that had my table up and running in about 30 minutes.
I calibrated Mach for my stepper motors simply by running the X and Y axis through its entire range of motion, measuring the distance traveled, and calculating the appropriate steps/inch. I ran some sample G-code files just to watch the machine work, and it appears to be working properly.

My steppers are very smooth and quiet at medium and fast travel speeds. At slow speeds they are very noisy and even appear to exhibit some jitter. This is the same behavior they showed when being controlled by the old 486. I suspect that, if I want to get rid of that problem, I will need to upgrade the motor drives to something more modern with micro-stepping. I don't know anything about the drives that I have now; they are on PC boards with no markings or numbers on them. There are a couple of DIP switches and potentiometers, but without knowing what they do I'm a little hesitant to fool with them. I'll snap a photo of them and upload it later today.

[dyode]

I managed to put in a couple of hours on the CNC table yesterday; I installed both Mach3 and Mach4. I tried to set everything up in Mach3 first as I had a little bit of prior experience with it but it repeatedly locked up, seemingly at random. Each time required a restart of Mach3 and a power cycle on the smoothstepper. I was able to get it to communicate with the smoothstepper, but every time I tried to make any settings changes it would freeze. I could have spent some time to figure it out, but decided to set up Mach4 instead. That went off without a problem. I followed the Mach4 setup video on the Warp9 website and that had my table up and running in about 30 minutes.
I calibrated Mach for my stepper motors simply by running the X and Y axis through its entire range of motion, measuring the distance traveled, and calculating the appropriate steps/inch. I ran some sample G-code files just to watch the machine work, and it appears to be working properly.

My steppers are very smooth and quiet at medium and fast travel speeds. At slow speeds they are very noisy and even appear to exhibit some jitter. This is the same behavior they showed when being controlled by the old 486. I suspect that, if I want to get rid of that problem, I will need to upgrade the motor drives to something more modern with micro-stepping. I don't know anything about the drives that I have now; they are on PC boards with no markings or numbers on them. There are a couple of DIP switches and potentiometers, but without knowing what they do I'm a little hesitant to fool with them. I'll snap a photo of them and upload it later today.

Good info sewerzuk, Did you use a breakout board or did you wired the drivers directly to the smoothstepper headers? Have you run MACH4 with plasma cutter powered up and cutting ? You might find a number on the driver that contains 6410 that from my limited knowledge might be the model number that is typical for that vintage.The description you provided for the motor drivers is a similardescription of the drivers that came with my machine, mid 90’s dip switches…there is a lot of tech data available for the 6410 driver.

[sewerzuk]

Good info sewerzuk, Did you use a breakout board or did you wired the drivers directly to the smoothstepper headers? Have you run MACH4 with plasma cutter powered up and cutting ? You might find a number on the driver that contains 6410 that from my limited knowledge might be the model number that is typical for that vintage.The description you provided for the motor drivers is a similar description of the drivers that came with my machine, mid 90’s dip switches…there is a lot of tech data available for the 6410 driver.

I do not see any numbers anywhere on the stepper drives; but I can't see the backside of the boards very well. There might be something back there. My power supply/interface/motor drive box already had a parallel port receptacle on it that was wired to the stepper motor drives. So, I simply used that instead of a breakout board.

I have not yet cut out any parts. I THOUGHT I was going to do that tonight, but I spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get Mach to turn on my plasma torch. At first I spent some time struggling to figure out that the "spindle on" output on the I/O settings was what I was looking for. I thought I had it configured correctly in Mach, but every time I sent a M03 command the state on the parallel port pin didn't change. It always read 0v. I kept thinking that I had something set up incorrectly, so I burned a bunch of time fooling around in Mach. At some point, I unplugged the parallel port from my power supply and hooked my DVOM directly to the cable and sure enough...I could toggle between 0v and 5v with the m03 and m05 commands. Turns out a homemade step-up/isolation circuit in my power supply box was to blame. I suspect that the smoothstepper isn't capable of delivering the same current that the old 486/66 was; so it wasn't able to drive the relays for the torch like the 486 did. It isn't a problem; I'll come up with a better circuit tomorrow. I'll probably just rig something temporary up so that I can do some test cuts, and order a 5V solid state relay to install at a later date.

In the meantime, I downloaded a Suzuki emblem, turned it into a DXF inside of A9Cad, turned that into G-code inside of sheetcam, and then sent it to the machine. I taped a sharpie to the torch head so I could see it make something. Worked pretty good...

[dyode]

[QUOTE=sewerzuk;1762518]I do not see any numbers anywhere on the stepper drives; but I can't see the backside of the boards very well. There might be something back there. My power supply/interface/motor drive box already had a parallel port receptacle on it that was wired to the stepper motor drives. So, I simply used that instead of a breakout board.

I have not yet cut out any parts. I THOUGHT I was going to do that tonight, but I spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get Mach to turn on my plasma torch. At first I spent some time struggling to figure out that the "spindle on" output on the I/O settings was what I was looking for. I thought I had it configured correctly in Mach, but every time I sent a M03 command the state on the parallel port pin didn't change. It always read 0v. I kept thinking that I had something set up incorrectly, so I burned a bunch of time fooling around in Mach. At some point, I unplugged the parallel port from my power supply and hooked my DVOM directly to the cable and sure enough...I could toggle between 0v and 5v with the m03 and m05 commands. Turns out a homemade step-up/isolation circuit in my power supply box was to blame. I suspect that the smoothstepper isn't capable of delivering the same current that the old 486/66 was; so it wasn't able to drive the relays for the torch like the 486 did. It isn't a problem; I'll come up with a better circuit tomorrow. I'll probably just rig something temporary up so that I can do some test cuts, and order a 5V solid state relay to install at a later date.


Just athought - The power supply in the 486 should have 5, 12 ,24 vdc availableand if it is modular/transplantable to your driver enclosure assuming thesmoothstepper spindle output is an open collector you should able todrive the "plasma on" relay with a small amount of wiring using the 486 PS.

[LeeWay]

Mach 3 will not run on a 64 bit machine.

[sewerzuk]

Mach 3 will not run on a 64 bit machine.

It was my understanding that Mach 3 itself runs fine on a 64bit machine, but you cannot use the parallel port plugin. Since my laptop doesn't have a parallel port and I am running an ESS that didn't matter to me.
Maybe I'm missing something though?

Edit: Just went back to machsupport and re-read the system requirements for mach 3:
"32-bit version of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (64-bit versions will not work)"

For some reason I had it in my head that it would run fine on 64 bit systems as long as you weren't using the parallel port.
I suppose that explains the random lockups!

[sewerzuk]

Made my first cuts with the table. I set up the camera in case something spectacular happened. Everything went well for the first cut but I had the feed speed set too high for the 1/4" material that I was cutting in.
A quick consumable change and an adjustment to the feed speed, and try number 2 was more successful.

https://youtu.be/_muDZQOBxeM

[Greolt]

Mach 3 will not run on a 64 bit machine.

Thats odd. I use Mach3 on a 64 bit Win7 laptop regularly.

The LPT driver will not, and never will work on 64bit

Unfortunately there is a lot of bad and out of date info around, even on official sites.

[LeeWay]

Well, they also used to say that it was unsupported for laptops as well. I have ran many machines off laptops. I heard of a few guys that did get it to work with 64 bit, but for the most part, it has issues. The OP was having issues, so I let him know what was probably the cause.

The machine looks good. Cuts look good for first cuts too.

[sewerzuk]

Thats odd. I use Mach3 on a 64 bit Win7 laptop regularly.

The LPT driver will not, and never will work on 64bit

Unfortunately there is a lot of bad and out of date info around, even on official sites.

My laptop ran the software fine, and communicated with the ESS fine. Every few minutes it would lock up and require me to close it in the task manager and also power cycle the ESS.
I may have had some other issue...I didn't bother to take the time to figure out what the real problem was. Mach 4 ran just fine and, even though I had a little prior experience with Mach 3, Mach 4 was the clear winner when it came to intuitive setup, menus, GUI organization, etc. I would have spent more time trying to sort out issues with Mach 3 if I didn't have other options.
I was running trial versions of both; but I'll go ahead and purchase a license for Mach 4 next week.

[Greolt]

I heard of a few guys that did get it to work with 64 bit, but for the most part, it has issues.

Don't tell my machine ......after running faultless all this time, it might go on strike.