Heelp! Dual axis steppers.. Losing steps.. Pulling hair out..!

[fasteddy]

Hi again..

Finally!! It started doing it again.. It was the steps on the driver board, had it set to 1/8" step, once I got it down to 1/4" step it ran smoothly.. I guess my steam powered laptop (P3 600MHz) was not up to calculating so many steps.. Shame as the movement is not quite as smooth as I would like.. Better than a poke in the eye with a bent stick though..!

Steve..

[HiltonSteve]

Glad to hear that the fan idea worked but not so glad to hear about your problems re-appearing.

I would try and get my hands on an old pc to run it off rather than a laptop, heard about one or two people that have had problems using them and then other people having no issues at all, just pot luck into which category you fall.

If you lived a bit closer you could and come and 'borrowed' one of mine as I have a stack of half decent PC's in the corner of the workshop that would do a better job of running mach3 than your laptop.

[fasteddy]

Ah.. What it is to be wealthy, well, in PC's that is.. Have built my CNC router for the princely sum of £400 all in.. Laptop was from freecycle so can't be sniffed at.. I did change the format of Windows 2000 from laptop mode to that of a desktop pc, bit fiddly as some of the drivers were not the same but it seems to work fine and does the job well enough for me at this stage..
If I can make a bob or 2 with it I will upgrade everything as I go along but am happy enough with it as I think I have a lot of learning to do what with software and all that..

Will post some pics when I have finished a bit of tweaking..
Thanks for all your help..!
Steve..