Newbie (ageing rapidly!)

[Neale]

I know with the NVEM driver on first start-up I can find (though never really bottomed it) that I can't jog until I home the machine. Maybe a driver issue, but I usually have a 2 minute tussle persuading the machine to start moving - either a G1 X1 feed through the MDI or a home resolves and I then get distracted and never investigate further.

Mach3 has the same "feature". A bit of a pain if you've parked the gantry at the far end of the machine at the end of the previous session as homing speed is slower than usual rapid speed. I found that it was because I have soft limits enabled - Mach3 errs on the side of caution and doesn't allow jogging until homed as it can't check soft limits otherwise. Don't know if it's the same on your controller. Just a thought.

[Doddy]

Mach3 has the same "feature". A bit of a pain if you've parked the gantry at the far end of the machine at the end of the previous session as homing speed is slower than usual rapid speed. I found that it was because I have soft limits enabled - Mach3 errs on the side of caution and doesn't allow jogging until homed as it can't check soft limits otherwise. Don't know if it's the same on your controller. Just a thought.

Cheers - you might be right. I'm doing a lot of work on a plugin for my machine at the moment and learning an awful lot of the weirdness of M3 (like default feed rates on initialisation).

[Neale]

That one really narks me - first thing after startup these days I overwrite the feed rate to 3000. Initial jogging at 6mm/min is awfully tedious...

Some time I'm going to be doing a CNC conversion on my own vertical mill, so I'm finding these discussions of various control options very interesting. One thing I know is that it's unlikely to be Mach3! Seems to be some good options available or close to available.

[Desertboy]

I'd try and make one of your USB solutions work.

The Nvum controller seems a good place to start.

Join this forum then read this thread back to back, you are not alone.
https://en.industryarena.com/forum/h...-315210-5.html

This guy has an updated beta driver
http://www.opalsfromaustralia.com.au/cnc/

He has same controller as you, should be able to help you get going and is a forum member on industryarena.

I had a lot of the same issues. Went to win 7 32bit and a lot of them stopped. Still have a few issues but the router now runs for hours no problem.

Before I went back to 32bit operating system I tested on another 64 bit system and had the same issues. I was about to buy a different controller but decided to format and try again. Turned out to be something in the 64 bit operating system. Took me months of frustrating fault finding after work.

The nvem now happly runs my Alpha 1300x2500 router and has paid for it's self several times over.

[JAZZCNC]

That one really narks me - first thing after startup these days I overwrite the feed rate to 3000. Initial jogging at 6mm/min is awfully tedious...

This is what annoys me when people knock mach3 when really it's the user ignorance. If you go into General Config you'll see initialization String just enter the feed you want into there and will always be set to that when Reset.

[Neale]

I thought that I had tried that (it's obvious that there are initial settings and I did look for and find where they were set) but it didn't work. So, probably user error rather than user ignorance in this case! I'll have another look - thanks. It's only a nark, hardly a show-stopper, and less important than not being able to dual-axis home with my IP/M. But I used one of those with my eyes open and I can work round that easily enough. Mach3 works well enough for me but there are always odd items where you think, "I wouldn't have done it quite like that!"

[JAZZCNC]

hardly a show-stopper, and less important than not being able to dual-axis home with my IP/M. But I used one of those with my eyes open and I can work round that easily enough.

This can be done with IP-M if you want to do it. Just takes little out of the box thinking but agree it would have been better if Cslabs made it possible in software.

[Neale]

This one's frustrating because they clearly have the code to do it in the IP/S - maybe the IP/M processor is at the limit of its memory? Maybe it's a marketing decision to make people buy bigger?

I did wander outside the box. One solution would be to add in a little bit of electronics to do the homing. However, that would have to sit between the IP/M and the EM806 and receive/transmit differential signals. That's not a big deal but it's just a little bit more complicated than "just" sticking an Arduino in there with 5V single-ended signalling and it wasn't worth the effort. I also looked at setting up two different machine profiles, with a second one that treated the two slaved axes as separate axes. You can configure Mach3 to home these simultaneously, and I think that this would have worked except that it looks as if you can only have one IP/M profile that loads for every Mach3 profile. Because the IP/M profile knows about slaving, you can't do it.

Current workaround is home the machine normally, then hit e-stop which takes power off the steppers. Manually turn the slave axis pulley watching the LED on the home proximity switch, and in effect manually go through the Mach3 homing sequence. Not as accurate as it probably only goes to the nearest whole step (because of stepper cogging effects) but given that that's max 5/200mm error (5mm pitch ballscrew), about a thou in old money, and at one end of a 1000mm gantry, that's not a whole lot out of square.

But if there's a better way - I'm not too proud to nick other people's ideas!