First Time Help

Now try the EMC2 config then, it might well work now.

Todd Zuercher wrote:

The steps/inch is about 1800 for the Y axis and 1500 for the X (Z is 2000 but it dosn't need to go that fast)

Am I expecting to much from software stepping?

It was software-stepping in the DOS software, so should be able to work at least as well in EMC2.

1800 st/in and 800 in/min = 24000 st/sec = 41uS per step.

What do you have for base thread rate and stepgen max vel?

If EMC2 is reporting following errors it means that either the base thread is too slow to keep up or that the stepgen rate is maxing out. There is no actual feedback.

Can you attach your HAL and INI files?

Your base period seems a little long for your quoted latency, you will max out at 7kHz with 72000nS. That correlates well with your quoted speed of 200 in/min. Your latency of 13,000 should allow 30,000 base period and possibly 15,000. (Try it and see, if you see "unexpected realtime delay "errors you will need to adjust up)

The PCL720 driver doesn't have a "reset" function which the parallel port driver has (which allows a full step every thread, rather than every other thread). It might be possible to add it by simply copying the method used in hal_parport. That would double the possible step rate.

However, it might be simplest to tweak the drives. At 1500 step/in you have an accuracy of under 1/1000", which seems excessive for a router and probably rather exceeds the stiffness of the machine. You can probably adjust the servo drives to a smaller number of pulses per rev.

If the drives can accept a quadrature input (which EMC2 can happily generate) then that would double the step rate too.

Do you need more speed, or is that fast enough?

You will probably find that actual cuts are faster and smoother, even if the rapids are slower.