>
> >It's also just occurred to me that I could leave the PC, and driver box
> on,
> >and just unplug the motors until I'm ready to go again. I'm not sure how
> bad
> >that would be for the system. My thoughts turned toward things like
> >back-EMF.
>
> And that will u$ually break the mirror and let the $moke out of the
> driver$.
> The motors must be connected with dependable, solid, no intermittents
> allowed
> cabling as long as the drivers are powered up.
Alright, that's two people spreading caution. Thanks for the warnings! Point
taken - I definitely don't want to burn out a $600 box.
> I have left it running, turned out the lights and gone to bed, not coming
> back
> till noonish the next day on a couple of projects and have gotten away
> with
> it.
I've done it once so far, with a really complicated (for me, as a newb)
setup that I didn't want to have to redo. In the morning, however, I
couldn't take it anymore, and shut it all down before heading off to work. I
was right, too - it was nearly impossible to get it back to the right
location later. I had essentially nothing off of which to key.
> The box is a long cube, long enough to
> hold a 4 axis board, 3.5" square, with a 12 volt ex psu fan in each end,
> one
> blowing in, the other out, and they are running on about 18 volts. Not
> all
> of those fans will take that sort of abuse, but its been my experience
> here
> that if it lasts an hour, it will last for years, one of them is probably
> 10
> years old now! They are noisy at that speed though. And zero chance of my
> drivers overheating which is the real criteria. :)
>
Wow, I didn't realize they were so rugged. I'll definitely keep them in mind
now, for all manner of projects.
Are you thinking emc uses a serial port? Not normally since there is little
> that is real-time about serial. Most use a parport interface.
>
I was indeed thinking that, having forgotten (blocked out?) all of the
annoyance of tracking down the parport 'upgrade' for my Shuttle XPC, and
waiting for it to arrive. I used to turn my nose up at parports, as they
were so large, and 'old-fashioned,' but having multiple, simultaneous I/O
lines, and dead-simple communications I admit has enough appeal to draw me
back in. I've wired up cables, and even ran a custom serial port to my
electronics bench from my PC across the room, so I could program
microcontrollers in places without constantly bringing the setup back over
to the PC, so I'm thinking I should just rig up an inline box that provides
me with headers for all these helpful extras I'm missing. Even though it's
completely unnecessary fluff for me, I'd love to see the spindle stop itself
when it's done making the part for once. I'd have to break into the mill's
power box for that, but that's easy enough (he said, confidently).
emc does have the inputs. If your box doesn't have them available due to a
> lack of breakouts, thats fixable. All 17 usable pins on a parport are
> either
> used by xylotex, or are present as passive terminals on the edge of the
> xylotex board, take 'em wherever. I'm running 4 axis's & the spindle ATM,
> and still have about 5 pins I could use for other things leftover, but I
> don't have home/limit switches setup yet either.
I've been convinced for probably a year now (while busy with other things,
and procrastinating on getting my machine bench set up finally) that I had
no easy option for getting more inputs to emc, so this is exciting news,
indeed. I'm pretty eager to figure out a homing solution, too, though it's
much lower priority than ATM about 20 other projects. There's never nearly
enough time in a day, or a weekend.
Thanks, Gene!
-Gary
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/
_______________________________________________
Emc-users mailing list
Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
