[CEStanley]

Hi,

I was cutting a part for a friend out of AL6061 T6 Aluminum and using a Ball End Mill (1/4 inch) so the cuts where taking a long time. I left Mach3 in "Offline" mode from the "Program Run (Alt-1) screen all night which I do occasionally. When I attempted to put Mach3 in non-Offline mode the next day, the yellow ring around the "Offline" button went off but the Motors did not get power. I checked the 24V power supply and it is outputting 24.1 V. If I turn the off the Charge Pump on G540, it comes out of Fault but the motors will not move and are getting no power.

My Ports and Pins setup is as specified on the G540 Port #1 enabled at 0x03F8 per Com Port Properties.
,X axis: Port 1, Step 3, Direction 2, Y axis: 5, 4, Z axis: 7, 6
Diagnostic screen looks almost stopped, "Time in Int." is moving but "Pulse Frequency is locked at 23258 which is odd. I usually moves around.

As my G540 is in FAULT mode, the Motor outputs are disabled. I changed the G540 to a good G540 and as soon as I enabled "Charge Pump" on the G540, it went into FAULT.
I have attempted a reload of Mach3 to no avail.
Running "Driver Test.exe" states System Excellent (at 75kHz which is what I used before reloading. The graph looks great in DriverTest.exe).
GetPortAddress.exe does not run (maybe it is internal code).

Need the pulse train out of Mach3 to make it to G540 on pin 15 I think.

Please help. I have read everything I can think of and have not found the solution.

[CEStanley]

Hi anyone,

I turned off the Charge Pump and the axis are moving so something went wrong with Mach3 or my main board EPP port. Does anyone have experience with the EPP port? How can I check if the pulse is there?

Thanks,
Stumbling

[CEStanley]

Well, my mill is now up and working. I checked the watchdog signal in pin 16 source to pin 12 ground on the LPT cable and it was there but had a lot of jitter. It could be that Mach3 doesn't use a system timer to generate the signal. But without knowing the software it would be hard for me to know for sure. The jitter is around 400uS which is a lot. It the watchdog had been placed as a system timer call in windows it would be steady.

[ger21]

It the watchdog had been placed as a system timer call in windows it would be steady.

It probably would have been worse.

Mach3 actually takes complete control over Windows, in order to provide better timing, and prevent Windows form interfering.

If you are running at 75Khz, try backing it down to 35Khz or 45Khz, and see if it's any better.