Mesa 5i25/7i76. Looking for some help.

Yes I have set them up using their MSP software. Using the same speed and acceleration settings, both motors run smooth and quiet. I doubt that the motors are the problem.

When I have them hooked up to the Mesa 7i76 I can see that the Z axis motor's measured speed is about 1/10 that of the X axis.

Teknic thinks it's the controller causing this behavior. I'm going to complete the PncConf wizard for now. Who knows maybe it's only an issue when I'm in the PncConf mode.

I would think it more likely it is your .ini file settings. Finish off your config, review the files and work through the settings by hand.

QUOTE:

Yes, they are same exact model. I had swapped them before and just tried again, the slow one always spin slower than the fast one no matter which axis I plugged it into. So I'm suspecting it has something to do with the motor, its internal firmware or something along those lines.

If this is true, this is a a motor/driver setup issue unrelated to LinuxCNC or the 7I76/5I25

Okay, so I finished up my config and have been playing around in the Axis lathe GUI to see how things work. I should mention that on each X and Z axis I have a normally closed switch installed (one for maximum X+ travel and one for maximum Z+ travel). I have no switches for the other ends. So in my config I set them up as Limit/Home Shared X Maximum and Z Maximum.

In the Axis GUI I first tried the home all function. The lathe started moving in Z- direction (towards the spindle) where I think it should be going the other way towards the switch. So I opened up my .ini file and added a minus sign in front of home search velocity to correct this. It works but then it never gets close enough to trip the Z switch. After a few more tries I get these error messages saying joint 0 and 2 on limit switch error. I played around some more and now got my X axis travel maxed out at one end (away from the X switch). Trying to make it go back it says Can't jog point 0 further past max hard limit. Not sure how to get my lathe out of this but none of the 2 switches were ever tripped and it won't allow me to manually jog it anymore lol.

Sometimes when setting up a machine, I found that Linuxcnc remembers erroneous data. It stores variables in a .VAR file probably called "linuxcnc.var" but it may vary on your setup. Locate this file in your config folder and delete it (or rename it to .bak). That should fix it.

It has always worked for me.

Yes my setup has this file. I deleted it but the limit switch error still shows up. There is another file called "linuxcnc.var.bak" is this needed?

I monitored the Z coordinate position display while it tries to home and can tell that the ClearPath was moving much much slower than what the coordinate number was displaying. I think this is what caused the error because Linuxcnc thinks the machine has now crashed because it exceeded the soft/hard limit when the motor has not actually moved that far yet to trip it. So to be safe it won't let me jog or turn the machine on.

It sounds like a scaling error (pulses per machine unit) in your ini file. eg. if it moves further than it thinks the length of the axis and does not hit a home button I guess it sounds logical it would stop. Run Linuxcnc from the command line (eg type "linuxcnc" in a terminal window). If your guess is correct, I would expect that stopping due to a configuration error would print a message to that effect in the console. I have seen a few messages something like "joint is misconfigured" but never experienced your issue.

Sorry I can't help further. I'm assuming the clearpaths are their "stepper killer" which look like a conventional stepper to LinuxCNC as I've never used servos.

I just remembered. Also check that all of the hal settings (eg. pid etc) for that joint are correct. I had a problem for ages that I could not figure out until I realised I'd commented out a signal in error.

Thanks for trying. I'm going to have to dig some more into why the machine's movement is off from the coordinate display. Increasing my step scale helps bring the speed up but position is still off. Maybe I should have went with stepper motors route lol.

Hmm ... Ok my plan now is to switch to NEMA 23 stepper motors and Gecko G251X drives. Hope I'll have better luck with a stepper system and won't have to mess around too much to get it working right.