I have come across a puzzling issue with the Toshiba laptop I use for my CNC router and wonder if any of the computer experts on the Zone have a possible cause and solution.
My laptop is a Celeron 400 and until recently I had Win98SE running on it.
I had no problems with it controlling my CNC router with Win98 and was even able to control the Opto-Relays I use to turn on the Router motor and the vaccum. These relays require min. 3VDC to activate.
Now I just recently reformated the laptop to so I could install Win2000 on it, which I need to run the newer version of CNC control software I want to use but now I can no longer activate the Opto-Relays. I checked the voltage coming out of the proper pins on the parallel port and it read 4.1VDC but once I connect the parallel cable to the control box on my router, the voltage
reads 1.9VDC under load. All I can figure is that I am not getting the same amount of voltage & current out of the parallel port now under Win2000 then I did under Win98.
Does this make sense to anyone?
I didn't think an operating system could have that kind of control over a computers output voltages.
Thanks,
Carl