Hi guys,
I have bought a Pendant of type Mach III P4S from Vistacnc
I run it on a PC with Windows XP SP3, Mach 3 version R3.043.066 DEMO mode (evaluating at the moment)
The PC has a Pentium 2,8 GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM.
Running parallel port and Gecko 540 drive.
I have a couple of problems:
1) There is a significant time lag from when I am turning the pendant wheel to when the CNC table starts to move. (As the USB bus is a very fast bus, no more than a few milliseconds latency should be caused by the USB transmission).
Can you please help me identify what may be causing that problem?
See link to video showing the problem here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYd4G_CHyAM
2) When approaching the soft limits from either side there is no slowdown of the movement . The table "bangs" into the soft limit without speed reduction. (same problem on all axes). Is this normal (I hope not)? This happens when I am using the pendant but when I move the table with the PC keyboard or the +/- keys on the pendant it slows down OK.
Here it "bangs" into the end stop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POpvmnCZ43Q (run with pendant)
Here it slows down OK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSGomGBBVI (run with buttons, not with wheel on pendant)
3) The movement continues for significant time after I stop turning the button https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POpvmnCZ43Q
Seems like there is a "buffer of events" stored that has to be emptied before it stops.
However a pendant should be a real time device. Big latency cannot be tolerated (and it can be dangerous causing tool and mechanical crashes as well)
4) There has been several software crashes. Mach 3 has crashed and I had to forcibly terminate and reboot the PC. This happened after installing the Vista pendant. Everything looked ok before installing the Vista pendant. Any known solution to this?
Any hints to what is going on? Too slow PC? Can it be the case that the pendant normally actually is slow and sluggish like that?(hope not!) Settings problem?
I am also considering LinuxCNC by the way.
Next question:
I need an ethernet stepper controller for the G540 that is well supported, fairly recent design, can run both LinuxCNC and Mach3 and is reasonably priced. Any hints on a good product matching this spec? (4 axis)