creating a pre-set

The g540 samples availble in when first started up are wrong. How should I export my working one and suggest it be included in future releases?

Please explain what's wrong.

The micro stepping is incorrect, as well as a few pin assignments. I believe these settings are applied by the stepconf wizard, yes? THe layers of linuxCNC (what is an actual tool and what is a gui) are still confusing to me, although I do have a running machine now so I figure the next week or two I should know it quite well.

ish

ahh yes stepconf has no pin assignment selection specifically for the G540 - is the G540 plugged directly into the parallel port?

and the micro stepping is always expected to be set by the user.

Oh wait - do you mean the sample configs or using stepconf to build a config?

Chris M

between using stepconf, selecting template configs, and having my mach3 setttings transposed, and setting this up 3 seperate times Ican honestly say I am no longer sure. To be clear, I have linuxCNC working for me on my G540, I got it setup fine. However I want to make sure a new user has an easier time of getting up and running from a fresh install.

on a G540 microstepping is non-selectable, so there is no benifit to someone with a G540 not already being setup for the correct value when they choose a G540 based template. I may however be confused as to what drives the pre-sets in those boxes, so I will keep reading and digging as I can.

Hi

I have never personally used G540s, they are American, which means expensive over here. They are also quirky, eg. requiring higher current charge pump enable (EPP mode) etc.

One of their quirks appears to be micro-stepping. This is notionally fixed at 10X.

This is the figure that you need to input into calculations, ie 2000 steps per revolution.

According to info I have found, the driver will change the microstepping at higher speeds to full steps.
This actually sounds all good, until you think about what it does.

At high speeds it will move one 1.8 deg step for every 10 pulses it receives, so the software still has to produce the same number of pulses to travel the same distance,
it is just that the driver moves the motor a greater distance at a time.
The advantage will be that the motor is moving a real segment between rotor / magnet attraction and not an artificial interpolated one, which can only be more accurate and easier to achieve.

The 'disadvantage' is that this does nothing to assist the contraints of software pulse generation.
Add in 4:1 gearing and you might be limiting max velocities quite a bit on slow base thread machines, without the option to drop micro-stepping to say 4x, which is normally the highest I use.

To free yourself of these contraints, you will need to look at hardware generated pulses, if velocity is important or being limited by base thread speed and excessive micro-stepping

regards

The advantage will be that the motor is moving a real segment between rotor / magnet attraction and not an artificial interpolated one, which can only be more accurate and easier to achieve.

I believe the goal here was also to have the greater torque of a full step vs a micro step at higher speeds where it may be needed.

Rick G

So I spent a little too much time actually getting work done to contribute here, but I thought I would try and finish this before i forgot about it. I still don't konw where the wrong settings came from. I am going to run a liveCD to emulate a fresh install, and setup my machine and see where the problem comes from. I just looked at the config files from a latest pull from github and they seem right, so I don't know what overwrote them for me...

maybe not worth the effort.