Puruvesi MyCNC-ET7 Controller first look.

[Neale]

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.

[JAZZCNC]

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! .

Hi Ivan,

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.

[ivan-mycnc]

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.

[Ozemale6t9]

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?

[Neale]

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

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.

[ivan-mycnc]

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).

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/..._configuration

[ivan-mycnc]

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.

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.

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.



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.

[Neale]

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.

[ivan-mycnc]

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.