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(Jazz - just tried sending PM but your inbox is full!)
ok i'll sort it
Quick update for anyone following the saga...
myCNC runs fine on my Win10 laptop and on my Win10 desktop in the office. It does not run on my workshop PC. All run identical copies of Win10 (latest updates, etc). PV are investigating - sounds like the same problem that Jazz reported but it's a bit like Covid-19 in that only some apparently near-identical machines suffer and others do not! Good news from my perspective is that the MPG is supported and actually works better with myCNC than it does with Mach3.
After a lot of messing about trying to set up dual-boot on my workshop PC, I eventually put a second dedicated disk in the thing and have installed the Ubuntu/myCNC iso image available from the PV web site. This is also working fine, MPG support, profile files interchangeable between Windows and Ubuntu systems so all my config work using Windows has moved straight across. To put all this in perspective, it took a fair while to get the Mach3/CSMIO-IP/M/MPG compatibility issues worked out, and even then it was a touch flaky at times. Once myCNC is running, the user interface is absolutely identical on Windows and Linux so it doesn't matter that much to me which platform is used.
First impressions from setting up the thing is that much of what you have learnt from Mach3 does not work with myCNC; everything's there but it works in a very different way. For example, most Mach3 configuration is done via a set of tick boxes and values to put into tables, and the actual working happens in some internal black box. With myCNC and the ET* control boards, almost every bit of functionality is exposed and can be modified, and just getting basic parameters into the thing is somewhat more complicated. For example, the motor outputs and axis mappings are in one place, along with "steps per unit" and a max speed setting, while a different screen collects values for various max feed speeds. However, while limit inputs are set on a different screen, home sensor inputs are defined in the macros that are constructed to actually perform the homing actions. Yes, you have to create your own macros for homing, gantry squaring, etc. However, the documentation is pretty good (and not written in Chinglish), and there are a bunch of "wizards" that let you enter the necessary data (like homing sensor input pin) and it writes the macro for you. But you see the code, and can tweak it if you so desire. Users who struggle with "ports and pins" and the varioius motor settings in Mach3 might find all this a bit off-putting. But if you want to tune the machine to your exact requirements, it's all here. You can also use the given or generated macros and PLC routines as templates and examples when you come to write your own. I have a modified tool-height setting macro in place and I'm about work on a couple more variants plus tool-change macro. I can see why this controller might be used by commercial machine builders who can tune and tweak and extend to suit their particular needs; this is the kind of stuff that you only need to do once and then you hide it from the user who only ever sees the buttons to make it work.
I shall be looking at screen editing sometime as well. No GUI-based screen editor, but the screens are defined in XML modules which are easily edited and again there's plenty of material provided to act as examples if you need another screen layout.
I'm just pleased that I now have a system where I can just switch on the PC and while I'm fiddling about retuning the radio and so on, the PC is booting directly into myCNC. And it waits for the controller to be switched on and doesn't bitch about the IP/M not being ready yet - which usually meant stopping and starting Mach3 once the control box was powered up. The homing button now homes all axes and squares the gantry all by itself - another Mach3/CSMIO issue fixed. All good fun, even if I'm not expecting wonders from the improved S-curve trajectory planner with my machine's somewhat limited performance. But we'll see in due course.
Nah that's not fair Neale.!!. . . . . The ET would complain just the same if you hadn't turned on the control box before the software started. If the card isn't powered it can't connect so it's going to bitch. Or are you saying it will startup and bitch but when the controller comes online it just connects.? . . . If I could get it to work then I'd obviously know this.!! . . . I'm on 3rd win10 PC now it won't work with.??Quote:
Originally Posted by Neale
RANT WARNING.!! . . . I'm starting to get slightly pissed off with this card now.!... I've wasted another 4hrs... It's advertised as being able to run on Win10 and it won't or won't reliably.
I don't want to use Linux based PCs or mess around with dual booting etc. I need Windows-based Pc's so my users can use software packages like Vectric etc on the same PC. Plus if I wanted to use Linux based Pc's and mess around writing Macros then I'd use LinuxCNC with Mesa cards and save my self a lot of money.
This isn't really acceptable to me for a Card costing $700.!. . . . . I'm very disappointed to be honest because while it may work reliably on Linux OS it feels like they are selling a Beta version for Win OS and it's still got bugs clearly.
My guess is it will be something network/firewall related.
Win10 can be a nightmare for certain things randomly not working, and due to the mix of simple settings screens and old detailed settings, finding the right option can be challenging. Even with the firewall seemingly completely disabled, some connections still refuse to work.
I had to run an entire event over wifi once, because Win10 on my laptop simply refused to let me use a wired connection and connect to the required software from other laptops. Then when I got home and tried it to try and work out what the problem was, it worked perfectly. I still don't know what the problem was, and it's worked fine ever since :-/
To clarify - my experience has been that if I start Mach3 before the control box is switched on, or don't wait for 10s or so for the IP/M to start up, then I have to shut down Mach3 and restart it. myCNC and the ET6 don't care which order they start in - they just connect.
Frustration with your system understood - I would prefer Windows to Linux myself, but I can run with either. It's only the fact that I have seen it running on Win10 on a couple of systems that lets me believe that it should work. In my case, it seems to run reasonably OK on Windows (I've run it for a fair while but mainly for testing/configuration and only a little bit of cutting) on two machines, but crashes almost immediately on the workshop PC and I never even see the main GUI.
That is normal for most Ethernet-based cards that use a plug-in type system. The card as to be powered before the software is started so they can talk to each other, it's just the way they work it's not a fault so can't really blame the Controller. It's like trying to Drive off in your car, you learn to start the engine first.!Quote:
Originally Posted by Neale
I've not given up on this yet but at this money, it should work straight out of the box and the Fact Win10 is a pain in the arse shouldn't come into it because other software/hardware company's manage to make their controllers work with it no problems.
Regards the PC's they are not exactly low spec and 3 completely different machines. I've been doing this shit a long time and I've built lots of PC's so I'm not exactly green when it comes to PCs. I'm also very used to wrestling controllers into life so if I can't figure it out then your average DIY CNC builder is screwed.!! Again I shouldn't be doing this at $700
Hey Dean, sorry to hear you are having trouble. We've been getting reports of these Windows issues lately and are currently working around the clock to try and fix them - it's not exactly clear what particular hardware combination is causing these problems. All the Windows machines that we have on hand run myCNC fine - however, I do realize that is little help to you since you are stuck with a controller that doesn't want to play nicely with your computer!
In order to diagnose these problems, we have reached out to Neale, as well as some of our other clients to try and see if we can isolate the problem (that is again, not reproducible on our end). We have a couple of leads and are working on a solution. Let me know if you'd be interested in having us connect to your computer remotely to try and see if we can gather some more info that way.
Once again, sorry for the trouble.
Just to join the dots - I had a remote desktop session with one of the PV engineers a couple of days ago which helped to localise the problem area (appears to be some kind of discontinuity between the 3D graphics in myCNC and the graphics card OpenGL driver). The engineer has contacted me again today and we should be having another test session early next week so that he can run a debug version of the software to better analyse exactly where the problem lies. He did leave me with a workaround which is allowing me to run myCNC on my "problem" workshop PC although with some minor restrictions (which do not interfere with my normal operation). At least I can continue working on playing with some macros for the time being (my set of tool-height setting macros, sorting the M6 tool change macro to suit my way of working, MPG programming, etc).
There are a couple of other more minor Windows-related issues to do with screen sizing and startup position - as it stands, the initial configuration comes up with the myCNC window somewhat displaced to the right. That's OK - there are startup options to fix that. Unfortunately, on a smaller monitor, the "save configuration" button is off the edge... I'm told that a fix is coming out shortly! I fixed this one by doing the initial configuration on a two-screen PC, then copying the profile to my target machine. It's also possible to edit the relevant .xml file, except that until you have done it, it's not obvious which parameter needs to be changed. If anyone wants more info, give me a shout but at the moment I suspect that Dean and I are the only forum members (outside Ivan and friends) with an ET* series card.
This is just an update on the issues Neale has been facing - the problem ended up being the fact that his computer did not have NVidia drivers installed, so whenever the software would attempt to use OpenGL (for 3D visualization), the myCNC application would crash. Something to keep an eye on in the future.
Unrelated to that, we have been preparing a couple of videos related to network setup for myCNC since setting the network connection is the first and most important step. Here is a link to Part 1 of the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKypCtl1oL0
In short, the myCNC controller has a static IP address (192.168.0.78 by default), that 1) has to be unique within your local network, 2) has to be in the same subnet as the computer's IP address, and 3) has to be entered into myCNC (Settings > Config > Network tab). A static IP has proven to be a good solution in an industrial environment (for example, when a couple controllers are connected into a network to control one machine, or when one computer is used to control multiple independent machines). Plug-and-play devices, in our experience, tend to be harder to set up in an industrial environment as we have not found an optimal solution to ensure that multiple control boards do not conflict with one another that way.
The video above should serve as a good starting point for anyone who is having trouble setting up a connection between a Windows PC (either Windows 7 or Windows 10) and a myCNC controller. The network setup is only done once, and should take a couple minutes at most.
Aside from that, if anyone has more questions, I'm always happy to answer them here or through email.
As Ivan says, it looks as if my problem - myCNC crashes on Windows 10 shortly after it starts - was due to a graphics driver problem. This, perhaps, makes me look even more silly than usual. I suspect that what happened is that I have been running Windows 10 on my workshop machine for a while, and I am pretty sure that I had installed the graphics driver from the nVidia web site. However, a couple of months ago I had problems with Win10 and reinstalled. Win10 appears to have a bundled graphics driver that works fine with my nVidia graphics card and I have not seen any problems with it - until myCNC was installed. Unlike most Windows software which uses DirectX graphics protocols, myCNC uses OpenGL. It seems possible that the default bundled Win10 graphics driver works fine with DirectX, and may even work to some extent with OpenGL, but does not fully support OpenGL. The debug software that the PV engineer ran on my machine showed that Windows driver did not properly respond to OpenGL requests, but as soon as I installed the full nVidia driver, all worked fine.
There is also a simple workaround to the "save configuration button is off the screen" problem. There is a "minimise window" button available within myCNC (not the Windows-supplied button in the top RH corner of the window "frame"). Click this to minimise, then click on the taskbar myCNC icon to maximise it and the window is back in the correct place. This is a temporary workaround as I am told that the engineers are working on a proper solution to this, as well as tidying up a few loose ends on the Windows version.
I am now happy to run myCNC on Windows. I do have a few more problems but those are pretty detailed issues around macro writing and I shan't bore people here (if you have even read this far) and I shall be asking questions on the PV support forum, which is the right place for them.
Hi Ivan,Quote:
Originally Posted by ivan-mycnc
I will be in touch soon as I'm getting no where with this and it's been tried on 4 PC's now. I've just seen the post about Open GL and Nvidia driver and I will check but I'm 99% sure on the Win PC I first tried and the one I want to use, it's using Nvidia driver because it opens their Nvidia software when want to make adjustments.
My win7 Laptop which is rock solid stable and the machine I use to setup every machine and controller on is 100% using the Nvidia driver the other 2 PC's I'm not sure about and would need to check.
Hi Dean,
Absolutely, feel free to reach out to me through email, we'd be happy to connect to your computer and take a look at the problems with your myCNC installation. In general, I'd recommend making a list of things that are currently not working prior to us connecting to diagnose your machine - this may include screenshots, videos of the crashes, etc (especially since these problems appear on different PCs). Another engineer will be doing the remote diagnostics, so it will be helpful for him to have a step-by-step guide of things to take a look at.
Hopefully we can locate the source of your problem soon, so you can get back to actually using the controller.
Hi Neale...I only stumbled upon this forum today, and am interested in how you have found the setup process so far?
I have a small bridge-type CNC which has a dead motion controller card, and although the manufacturer still exists, cannot get any response regarding purchase of their latest card. So I am left with the option of finding an alternative and am considering either the CSMIO-IP/A +expansions or MyCNC-ET15.
The CSLabs option has so many pros (price, appearance, setup), but with the ET15 I'd be able to add extra axis at a later time. I currently have 4 analog servos (X,Y,Z1,Z2), and 2 servo-spindles (also analog), but a rotary table or trunnion table would be nice to add at some point. Also, the extra I/O options would allow for a custom control panel, should I go down that path.
My concern is with the overall setup and also customisation of the GUI. I've been playing with customising MACH4 (offline) and it seems relatively easy to do, but with MyCNC it may as well be Chinese (I don't have a clue about xml).
For the record, both Mach4 and MyCNC are new to me, so there would be a learning curve either way. It's a question of how steep do I want that curve?
A few points to discuss there! First of all, although I did have some initial problems in getting the thing to work at all under Win10, it is now running OK (although there are one or two minor tweaks PV are making to the Windows version to make it fit a bit better with the way that windowing works on Win10 but nothing that affects functionality).
Physically - the CSMIO box I used (IP/M) is better packaged, DIN rail fitting, etc, while the PV boards are unprotected PCBs. However, I found the connections easy to make (once I had the thing bolted in place) and the removable connectors make that a bit easier than the rather fiddly connections on the IP/M - in my control box, anyway, where the IP/M was fairly deep into the box. Electrically it was virtually a wire-for-wire replacement for the IP/M, 24V signalling, differential outputs, etc, with the exception that the IP/M allows a choice of common +24V or common ground for each input and the ET6 groups them in fours. I had to change a couple of my inputs but it was easy to do, fortunately, and what I now have would have worked equally well with the IP/M (and I now wonder why I didn't do it that way to begin with).
Remember that I am using the ET6, the baby of the ET family, and use steppers, not servos, and especially not analogue servos. I am using a slave axis (X+A) and after a little bit of fiddling with homing macros (these need customising for each machine although the basics are done using built-in macro creation wizards) homing and gantry squaring work fine. If you are not using a slave axis (sounds like you are not) I suspect that the standard homing macros generated by the wizards would be fine. In your case, you could run the Z homing wizard twice, giving the appropriate parameters (home switch ID) each time, then the overall homing macro calls Z1, Z2, X, Y macros in order.
It has taken me some time to sort out tool-height setting macros and I'm not quite sure if I'm there yet (been using the machine and parked this problem for the time being) and the tool-change macro (for manual tool change, in a way that lets me set tool height as part of the process) is still a work in progress. I'll be testing my latest version later this morning as the current job needs it! It's not obvious how you set things like the G28 tool-change position but again, I guess that this is part of the learning process and I had to climb the same learning curve with Mach3.
It's probably taken me a bit longer to get the ET6 set up than it did with Mach3 - but then, with Mach3, I never did get automatic gantry squaring working. Swings and roundabouts.
I have looked at the way that screen layout is defined and it's something that I want to play with. In particular, myCNC has separate tab pages for gcode (showing code progress, rewind, things like that - stuff you tend to use or watch while running) and basic machine controls (particularly "home all"). I would like a custom page that has the bits I regularly use always available on the same page, and things used less often (like selecting gcode file, odd bits like that) on a second page. I don't think that this would be too difficult but I just haven't actively played with this yet. There is no GUI for screen design although I am reasonably familiar with XML so I'm not too worried about having to work at this level. Maybe this is another Linux-type philosophy that has carried over - real programmers edit text files, only wimps use GUIs:smile:
At the moment, I have just one reservation that I have not properly investigated. A recent job involved adaptive clearing (as per Fusion 360) in a small area that needed to leave a small number of projecting "pips". F360 generates a lot of short straight moves (we are talking a few thousand lines of gcode) to achieve this, and the cutting action seemed to generate more machine vibration than I have seen in the past. My impression was that the CV mode was not properly smoothing direction changes as it should. However, I might be being too sensitive and I cannot now remember how the Mach3/IP/M combination handled this. It's something that I need to look at (maybe need to tune CV parameters?) before I make any formal statements about it. It's a pity that there are not more users of this hardware/software to exchange experience yet.
Happy to answer any more questions - if I can from my limited experience to date.
Edit - I've checked the CV settings and rather as I suspected, either the default was silly or I changed it without noticing/thinking. The max angle that maintains CV action as opposed to stop/start was 1 degree - in other words, it was almost always using stop/start. I changed it to 45 deg and things are much smoother - there's a surprise! I'm not sure how much smoother the s-curve trajectory planning should make but it's all looking fine anyway.
Not sure if you've had a chance to read through this manual already, but our documentation website does go into quite some detail regarding .xml editing: http://docs.pv-automation.com/mycnc/..._configurationQuote:
Originally Posted by Ozemale6t9
Just wanted to chime in and say that in case it does turn out that myCNC produces some unwanted vibration, please do let us know, either through email or our forum. Our team does check this thread from time to time, but it will probably take us longer to actually see that you have a problem on here than via our own forum.Quote:
Originally Posted by Neale
As for the problem itself, to start off you can try the Acceleration Override option in Settings > Motion. This is a new option that we added in one of our recent updates and it is currently undergoing testing. See if bringing the override value up helps lower the vibration.
Attachment 28488
Additionally, you can send us an example of the G-code that's giving you trouble so that we can take a look at it on our end. We are currently working on improving the CV mode, however the focus at the moment is on 5 axes jewellery machines. If it turns out that there are any issues with Fusion360, we'll be sure to try and fix the behaviour ASAP.
Thanks for the comments, Ivan. In fact, as I mentioned in my edit at the bottom of my last post, I found that I had set the "break angle" for CV operation to 1deg, a silly number, and that was the cause of my problems. Fortunately, I have seen the effect of non-CV mode previously and was able to identify it fairly quickly - then it was just a matter of trying to find out how I had managed to disable it or what parameters neede adjusting. I have not had a chance to retry an adaptive clearing toolpath since then, but it is working fine with other, less demanding but still showing stop/start effects, toolpaths so I'm happy now.
Completely missed your edit! Glad to hear the cause of the problem has been located.Quote:
Originally Posted by Neale