Proma THC 150 setup issues

Excellent set of steps, I'll be following them when its time to cut.
Im happy to see I already started in the right direction and use proma's test mode to validate the arc ok, up and down pins as they flashed in the Linuxcnc panel. I also just placed m3 in the MDI command bar with the plasma off and watched to torch touch off, go to pierce height and I can watch the LED on my relay board light when it tries to fire. It retries a few times and then gives up due to no arc-ok so all that seems to work great so far.

Talk about a small world. I'm about a half an hour away in Hillsborough, have been through Clinton many times.

tommylight wrote:

Nice, some more fiddling and you'll be cutting like a pro !

Oh well, he can not help as he does know nothing about this. When i get there (IF that is a big IF), i will try to come visit, for sure.

IT WORKS!!!!

I was messing with this on Sunday but just like everyone else my everlast plasma cnc plug would not put out any useful voltage for the Proma. I went inside the unit and got the voltage right from the torch leads. I ran a test cut just using my touch and go code to watch the voltage. Seemed like it was at 95 volts for 25 amps, 60ipm for 14 gauge. Dialed in the Proma and off it went. At6 first I had a large step size and it bounced all over the place, brought the step size way down and it was much smoother. I still need to tweak a bit and do the hill climb test you mentioned but I am very happy with the outcome. Here is a quick video I grabbed tonight, will get a better one in the near future.



I also ran with the THC on for a quick trace I did below, the Proma config ran flawlessly.

Absolutely, if you're ever in NJ swing by.

I was able to go in and update the .xml to keep my initial starting points to save some time. I also resized the travel height box so that I can use at least one decimal point since I'm working in inches instead of MM. The lowest it would go previously was 1 so my travel height of 1 inch meant a lot of unnecessary Z movement. I'm cutting on top of raised extruded so no real worry of tip-ups.

I ran most of the day yesterday and I've only got one little problem. If i'm making a small piece that has very short line segments that start close to where the last one ends, it looks as if the M3 misses the touchoff routine. It will fire the torch at the travel height and miss a short line of cutting or two and then catch up a pierce or two down the road in the Gcode. I added some debounce to the touch probe from the start since I had a small noise issue so I increased the count a bit to see if it was a noise problem but no change. Larger cuts that have some distance between them and the torch running for a few seconds have no issue.

I'm still using a post processor for my lead-ins so I think I'm going to try to add in a few seconds of dwell time after the M5s on small pieces to see if that helps the situation. 5 seconds of dwell would only add a little over 8 minutes to a 100 pierce job which is totally fine by me and 5 seconds is most likely overkill.

Wanted to come back and report that the dwell period on the M5 fixed the issue. I had it at 1 second and still had an issue every so often so it was bumped to 2 and all smooth.

I've been running the table every weekend since it was finished and besides the small little issues noted in this thread the proma configuration has been solid. I even ran into the end of my consumable life midway through a project and the torch wouldn't fire. It tried several times and gave up, I moved the torch over, changed the tip and ran from the previous line to resume my item, AWESOME!

Will just be minor tweaks from here on out and now that I've wrapped my head around the config I feel comfortable moving on to my next table build which will be a 4'x4' with a better quality plasma and the proma THC