A well-functioning configuration for ChinaCNCzone 3040Z-DQ

tommylight wrote:

I thought you were a seller when i made my comment about sending one for free ! My bad !

H'm ... It turns out that sometimes, without knowing myself, I make the impression of a solid person!

And what, sellers something now is entitled to a free transfer of machines?
Maybe throw this damned science, become a seller?

Ogogon.

Colleagues, the first big problem I decided!

I have achieved that all the axes of the machine have earned. The way it did it was not discussed here.

I have reinstall LinuxCNC again.
I remembered that when I installed this particular assembly of Debian, I did not like that there are packages that do not want to be updated. I really do not like it when they behave like this.

And without using the graphics program, I called the shell and su, and then told him - apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade.
He updated not only the installed packages, but also the system part of Debian. Put a new kernel, a new firmware and stuff.
It seems that they can not work normally with the parallel port, or EMC2 utilities through them can not work normally.

If I do only apt-get upgrade - all the axes start working.

Now it remains to understand the additional signals and the settings of the movements.

Ogogon

I gutted the "controls" of my spanking-new 1212 Chinese 3-axis machine in a fit of rage (not recommended) when I discovered that the assumption was that I would apparently use Windows95, and that forever. What provoked it was the extreme difficulty in finding a driver for their driver board and a motherboard to receive the board. As best I could tell, the board was a joystick/gameport controller. (I vaguely recall investigating for why in the world they might have settled on that, instead of the more common (or more properly stated, less-recently abandoned) parallel port and finally concluded that it was because the parallel port spec does not include supply 5V. (It doesn't?!))

The rage resulted in a joystick/gameport input card that had been hammered quite flat, so as to be beyond temptation of going back to.

I think I (must have) had some familiarity with the inside works of the box before doing it, but I certainly examined it closely afterwards.

In the end, I concluded that the stepper-motor controllers (big black boxes) were in fact, just "black boxes" that didn't care one bit where they got their step and direction signals from, and that the parallel port approach that had worked well with my very old linux computer and homebuilt machine didn't care "to what" it was sending signals.

That led to the inspiration to get one of those " CNC breakout boards " so popular and often mis-named "Mach3 boards" on ebay and proceed to connect the right wires to the right connectors--from both sides: the parport's and the machine's stepper controllers. [Incidentally, I discovered that the computer I was targeting for this install had no parallel port, and it too was "strange" enough that the search for an interface board for it was nearly as ridiculous.]

I puzzled over the USB connector on the board--at first misassuming that it was to allow me to "communicate" with the board somehow--but I finally guessed that it's there to provide 5V, and I ran a USB cable alongside the parallel cable. (At some point, I later added 24V (I think). I can't remember why--relay power probably, but it was simply a generic wall-wart adapter with the end cut off to bare wire, plugged into a source for AC, and the bare wires run to the board.)

I'm afraid this is the highest level of detail I can provide, but I hope it contains the germ of the approach to a solution.

I've been convinced a couple of times since that the board had failed, and changing it out for a spare was tedious enough that the second time it happened I used a barrier/terminal strip block between them so I could disconnect only the board's connections and leave the machine's connections intact.

(BTW, I paid big-time extra for higher-quality dual-stack stepper motors, only to find out later that the "inventive" Chinese vendor had substituted single-stack Chinese-marked motors that I found wholesaling on alibaba for 5 bucks. When contacted, the vendor said it was my fault for not noticing the switch--not having ever suspected the need to look under the decorative covers--until one of them failed--and after too-much hot-and-cold back-and-forth the vendor finally decided I was not likely a repeat customer and just stood by the fraud.

I got what I paid for of course, but I know their machine much better than they do. And they still don't know their machine can be converted to operate under Linux nor of any of the other improvements that can be made.)