On Wednesday 15 August 2018 08:30:58 Dave Cole wrote: > On 8/14/2018 10:28 PM, Dan Bloomquist wrote: > > That is the catch. Mach3 > > will glitch, especially if you switch apps while it is running. That > > can cause expensive booboos. > > Correct, you can't do that. Also you can't insert and unplug USB > drives while running, don't open a browser and listen to Pandora etc. > Don't open another window and start typing a letter, etc. > Treat the controller as a controller, and don't touch it to do other > things than to make your part. > That is your only shot at making Mach3 work reliably. > Glitches can happen and they can be very expensive. > > Make sure you cut up a bunch of cheap scrap steel before loading a 4x8 > sheet of 316 stainless! > > If you talk to the Mach crew they will tell you that Mach 4 is the > thing to use now, but that usually requires a hardware board and your > THC may not be compatible. > > There have been some good Mach3 controlled plasma cutters made and > then again there have been a lot of really poor quality plasma cutters > made as well. > The issues may not be all due to Mach3. If the gear ratio between the > motors and the linear axes is not sufficient, you will never get good > cuts. THCs vary wildly in quality. The better ones are not cheap. > > I don't think that there was ever an effective Mach3 solution to > square a gantry by homing without a hardware board like the > Smoothstepper. As I recall, when driving steppers with a parallel > port, I think there was a lot of glitches in the software when trying > to implement a gantry squaring solution. You can do your own > research on this at the Machsupport forum. > https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=25867.0 > > This kind of thing was why Mach4 was developed. > > In any case, Mach3 is just part of the puzzle. > > Dave > All of the above horror stories even 15 years ago, about mach was the big reason I've never tried it. I still haven't found my round tuit, so I still have one machine running steppers from a parport with linuxcnc.
Slower due to lower voltages on the motors and latency induced stalls, but at its 200 watt max spindle power thats ok, and I have browsed the web or ran an irc client while it was making stuff. Within the machines limits, it Just Works. And thats something I've never heard anyone accuse mach of doing well. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >-------- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's > most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
