Light Machine Corp. Benchman XTr (retrofit)

Naw the boards were stripped to make room for the KFLOP since I couldn't get that goofy interface board to communicate. I had it working and I hate to lose it. I was getting .001 accuracy but the school no longer needs it and I don;t have 220 in my garage. It's here in Dallas, Texas. I can't get to it right now... the tornado went right through my neighborhood and my house is pretty beat up. I might be able to get to the pump in a week or so.

SOS,
My XT didn't come with the original PC or Nextmove card but I was able to track down an old PC with an ISA slot and eventually also found a nextmove card. I first installed Windows 2000 but was never able to get that to work properly with the Benchman software; I got the same error messages about the Amps not being enabled. Then someone in this thread mentioned that Windows NT was the only OS that worked with the Light Machines software. Once I installed NT I was good. So I'm surprised that you were using Windows 98 to begin with. You might want to check the DIP switch settings on the Nextmove card and make sure they match the settings in the software, since you had to reinstall it. Also, remember that the ATC connects to the PC via a serial cable, and doesn't use the Nextmove card (unless it's getting info from the card that determines the position of the ATC). Could this be a Nextmove communications issue?

Wow. Sorry to hear about your house, Steve. I'll think about what other parts I might need in the future and post back here in a few days.
Good Luck.

SOS,

If you're trying to run on WIN98, that will not work.
It must be NT.

Hey Guys,

It turns out all I needed to do was re-seat the nextmov card and everything fired right up. I'm now back to where I started with before moving from windows 98 back to windows NT in that my machine runs but the ATC isn't quite consistent enough.

I think I'll have to do some tweaking of the ATC this weekend because there must be a machine-computer configuration that needs to be adjusted since the tools aren't lining up quite right with the spindle.

I've also noticed that my probe doesn't seem to be quite as plug and play as I was hoping. I'm not sure how to prove if it's a software issue in that I don't have the right machine configuration or it there's something else going on. I've got the probe wired from the pinout that you provided a couple weeks ago but when I open up the probe dialog box and try to teach the machine where the probe is located I'm not able to jog any of the axis except for z+ which only moves the tool up.

Do you know if this means I'm at the limitations of the software that was on the machine when it left the factory? Is there any way to get around it or does this mean I'm stuck and won't be able to configure the probe to my machine?

Thanks Guys!

Do you have the setup instructions for the toolchanger? It details how to set up the toolchanger with the Z-Axis height, and the offsets from the calculated ideal position ideal in encoder counts. All of this information is stored in one of the .ini files. Too long ago for me to remember exact specifics, but Intelitek should be able to provide you with the ATC setup procedures as it is required after a toolchanger "crash". Maybe it is in the "Configure ATC" dialog box. I do not recall which spindle model you have, but the process is fundamentally the same.