Help setting up Ethernet Smooth Steper

[Tenson]

Hi all,

I've got my ESS board powered up and connected to my laptop. I have set the network settings and installed the driver for Mach3.

When I load Mach 3 it talks to the ESS and says there are missing settings because it is the first time I've used it, so I accept default values.

Now I'm stuck!


1) The first message it gives when starting Mach3 is that no E-Stop has been assigned to an input on the ESS. Actually, I don't have a hardware E-Stop I've always used the Esc key on the computer. What to do? I will also need to assign the home switches.

2) How on earth do I get it to talk to my BOB?

Here are the settings I was using for the standard Mach3 parallel port driver.



The Motor tuning was:

Y and A axis (dual motors for long axis):100 steps/unit
X axis: 100 steps/unit
Z axis: 200 steps/unit
Maximum velocity 10,000 mm/min

3) Setting 'Max Step Frequency' and 'Controller Frequency'. Following the setup PDF HERE it says:

Steps/Unit * Units/Min = Steps/Min
Steps/Min / 60 = Steps/Second (or Max Step Frequency)

So using my previous steps per unit for the Z axis of 200 and a maximum velocity of 10,000 mm/min we get...

200 * 10,000 = 2000000
2000000 / 60 = 33333.333r Hz or 33.4 KHz

Does that sound right for Max Step Freq? The options on the ESS setup are 32 KHz and 64 KHz so I'd need to go for 64KHz on the Z axis.

It would of course be half that figure for the other axis which only have 100 steps/mm rather than 200 steps/mm, so should I set those axis to 32KHz because I can, or just use the same for all? (Edit: Actually while the X and Y axis go at 10,000 mm/min, the Z axis is slower at more like 3,000mm/min so 32KHz should be good for all axis, despite the Z needing twice the steps per unit).

What about 'Controler Frequency'? It is 1KHz default.