[gabedrummin]

I'm using a Quadrature encoder .It is set to 500 line count . I have my gecko 320x switch 2,3 set to on. Dose this mean I need 500 or 2000 steps to get one motor revolution ? I have my following error set to 256 should it be 1024 ?Thanks in advance for all your help

[gabedrummin]

I used the software to figure this one out.I do have a problem with Mach3 I believe. When jogging it will move .500 and it looks like the motor jumps . It dose not move as smoothly as I would like . Motors make no noise. Now in Mach 3 when I do the driver test it is all over the map Too fast too slow excellent too slow.Never stays steady for more than a second or two. I have tried low gain medium gain high gain factory gain .And tuned the motor to be quite on all settings and no help I also tried encoder settings from 500 to 2000 and no help ,anyone have any suggestions how to make it run better?Or should I bite the bullet and buy a smooth stepper motion controller. My current set up is a c-10 BOB 4 Gecko 320x set at 500 encoder line count low gain 256 following error. 1x step. Laptop running windows xp . Any help is much appreciated thanks guys.

[ger21]

Laptops are not recommended for running Mach3. Sounds like the PC is the problem. You need a flat line in the driver test, with a steady pulse rate. Try turning off all of the power saving options in the bios, and see if it helps. And disable any software running in the background.

[Torchhead]

I used the software to figure this one out.I do have a problem with Mach3 I believe. When jogging it will move .500 and it looks like the motor jumps . It dose not move as smoothly as I would like . Motors make no noise. Now in Mach 3 when I do the driver test it is all over the map Too fast too slow excellent too slow.Never stays steady for more than a second or two. I have tried low gain medium gain high gain factory gain .And tuned the motor to be quite on all settings and no help I also tried encoder settings from 500 to 2000 and no help ,anyone have any suggestions how to make it run better?Or should I bite the bullet and buy a smooth stepper motion controller. My current set up is a c-10 BOB 4 Gecko 320x set at 500 encoder line count low gain 256 following error. 1x step. Laptop running windows xp . Any help is much appreciated thanks guys.

If you are tuning a Gecko 320X by setting to minimum noise you have to set to minimum response. Its so loose that it makes the motion sloppy. Like a guitar. you don't tune for no sound from a string. The motor "dithers" between encoder counts (thus the frequency) . The looser the tuning the more encoder counts it takes. A properly tuned motor will sit and dither between one or two counts on the encoder and do that rapidly. If you try to rotate the shaft it will fight you to hold that tiny amount of movement. Setting the dampening too high makes the response spongy. As ger21 says, a laptop is a poor choice for MACH3 and a parallel port system. It can work better with something like the ESS ethernet card where the timing is not taken from the processor but even then there can be subtle problems. Even with the PC issue resolved the servo response needs to be redone.

[gabedrummin]

Got the smooth stepper fixed the choppy movement .