[tady]

Hello everyone!

i have a problem with my friends cnc milling machine running MACH3. The oulses on the output are not stable... the speeed constantly changes and there are lost steps.
i tried everything (win7,WinXP, disabling services, onboard LPT, PCI LPT,...) nothing works..
So we will try to find another PC or buy a motion controller(Smoothstepper,...).
i was looking on ebay and came acros some chinese motion controllers... and im asking does anyone have this controller?
SainSmart 4 Axis Mach3 USB CNC Motion Controller Card Interface Breakout Board | eBay

thank you!

[CNCMAN172]

Tady,

You did not mention the type of PC you are using. Mach3 can run on XP, Win7 with no issues. It works best on a desktop type machine and Pentium 4 processor or better, a 3GHz processor works great. Also check the MACH3 Kernel frequency, put that at the lowest setting about 25KHz as I recall. If that is set to high you lose a huge amount of realtime using the parallel port. To avoid using the Windows pulse engine in MACH3 you can use a USB or Ethernet external motion controller. Ethernet Smooth Stepper (ESS) are pretty stable and the KFLOP is a great external USB board however they take a little more effort to setup. I have no experience with the Chinese USB external motion controllers, so I can't comment. I would also check your velocity and acceleration on each axis as if they are set too high you will lose steps. I think I would want to figure out the root cause of the issue before jumping into an external motion controller. I have the KFLOP, ESS, and a parallel port machine, they all work great. Literally thousands of users have MACH3 running with the parallel port, so either your PC is too slow or you have the kernel frequency way too high. Check those and you might be surprised.

Russ

[tady]

Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L
CPU: IntelQ8400 (Quadcore) 2,66GHz
RAM: 3GB

the system is more than enough powerfull. I think there is some hardware issue.
I have a small CNC machine with a 5W laser and i run Win7 and i have absolutely no problems.
The windows has all the services running and i have other software installed and it works great. Even the hardware in much worse and it goes like a champ

But this machine does not work... Pulsing to slow, pulsing too fast... i have tried changing the kernel speed no difference.

[CNCMAN172]

Tady,

Normally Gigabyte motherboards are good candidates for MACH3. I agree a quadcore processor is plenty of power, although MACH3 is only using one of the four processors. Some boards have chipsets that seem to have issues. You might suggest to your friend to get a different motherboard and keep that quadcore processor, since motherboards are $50 to $150 these days he can probably find a good one for pretty cheap. The other option is to buy an old XP box, however I do like Win7 better these days, but I ran XP for nine years with no issues.

Russ

[RCaffin]

The windows has all the services running and i have other software installed

There is your problem.

Other services are time-sharing with Mach and interrupting it. You need either to totally dedicate this machine to running Mach and NOTHING else, or use an ESS. You will find instructions on the Mach web site covering all the Windows services you need to turn OFF: follow those instructions. No, do NOT connect the machine to the Internet for web browsing and email while you work!

Both XP and W7 work fine, IF DEDICATED.

Cheers
Roger