steppers jerky

[300magnum]

Hi all, hopefully someone here will have an answer to this one.

I have just hooked everything up, 425 oz steppers, Keling KL4030 drivers, C10 breakout board, and using MACH3 software.

All seems ok except the speed that the motors are turning at is very slow, I have tried changing the settings in the motor tuning section of MACH3 but all I seem to be able to do is slow them down even more, also they seem to be very "steppy", rather than a smooth rotation they sorta go tick tick tick as they slowly move around. ( I guess this is because they are turning so slow)

I was fiddling around yesterday changing the switch settings on the drivers and that made a bit of difference but not much.

I have wired the motors up bipolar parallel as this was how it was shown in the diagrams from Keling and CNC4PC.

One other thing, when I am running some test code, if I move the computer mouse all hell breaks loose and the steppers speed up until I let go of the mouse, I have set the JOG hotkeys to keys on the keyboard but it still happens when I move the mouse, any thoughts??

thanks in advance for any advice,

Cheers,
Steve.

[ger21]

Run drivertest.exe (in the Mach3 folder) and see if you get a straight line. It sounds like something may be interfering with Mach3.

[300magnum]

I ran the drivertest last night and there were all sorts of spikes along the graph and now nothing works at all, no movement from any steppers and some of the functions in MACH3 have stopped working as well.

I have triple checked all my wiring and connections and all appears ok, steppers all power up when power is switched on to the drivers etc but nothing else is happening.

I am wondering if something has gone wrong in MACH3?

This is all new to me and now I am completley confused

[CNCZONERAMICO]

Have you fixed the problem? Asking, because I am experiencing some strange similarities to your problems, with a pre-assemled Keling controller and Mach 3, motors try to home smoothly then jerk and go into fast motion, tried to run same process at various times and recalibrating the motors' steps per, same thing happens..this appears to be spontaneous and spurratic, when I run a program. Manually I can jog the motors and they run fine, have been able to jog with various sppeeds and accelerations, problem only happenes when I try to run a program. I tried my own programs that use straight G code and the Roadrunner program that comes with Mach3, same thing happens, the motors start smooth, then all of the sudden, go into a sort of wild jerky fast motion ???. I checked the system frequency via Mach3Diagnostics' tab, it is holding steady at 25.000 +- ...

My next step was to download the documentation from keling site on the specific drivers that were installed on their pre-assembled controller 3 axis box (the blue box) and see if there is any adjustment there ....

Help! please! suggestions? Keling? any input?

[300magnum]

Hi, I still havent got it sorted yet, I uninstalled Mach3 and then reinstalled it and that seemed to make it a bit better but not much.
My main problem is that the steppers dont seem to be keeping up with the program, eg, the DRO on the screen will be reading off travel as the program is running but the motors arent turning anywhere near fast enough to be actually replicating what the program is saying, also the motors are very very jerky as they rotate and seem to be missing lots of steps.

I have triple checked everything from wiring to all my input values.
The biggest problem seems to be a lack of and conflicting information.
The schematics from Keling and CNC4PC are all very well, but when you wire all your bits and pieces up according to the schematics and it wont work you're stuck.

Very confusing and frustrating.
Hopefully someone with some wisdom will chip in.

[Kelinginc]

could you email me the mach3mill.xml file to me at support@kelinging.net and Brian support@machsupport.com. I will ask Brian to check for you

[CNCZONERAMICO]

I switched from a laptop to a regular PC and this improved considerably not only the clock speed but the motors are no longer running jerky. I have also done some other things in my particular setup, that I explain in my thread on the Keling Controller Box. Go there and you will find perhaps some info that might help. I still have one minor issue to resolve, it is all in that thread.

Thanks Keling for responding.

[ckm]

If you are using a laptop, some parallel ports on laptops don't have the power to drive the breakout boards as they output 3.5v instead of 5v. Getting a SmoothStepper or switching to a desktop machine will fix this.

HTH,

Chris.

[CNCZONERAMICO]

Chris, I appreciate the response. That answers a lot of questions I had with the original laptop I was using and explains the troubles I was having with it originally... but I am beyond that now. Thanks again.

[300magnum]

Hi, me again, I think this is also my problem, last night I measured the output voltage from my PC's serial port and it is only 2.6V, I think my PC might be the problem.

A friend is bringing his computer over this weekend and we are going to try it on his.

Last night we had the mill running nice and smooth but only by constantly moving the mouse while it was running, as soon as I let go of the mouse the steepers slowed down and went all jerky, roll the mouse around on the mouse pad and all is sweet.

To my non computer orientated brain and my friends very computer orientated brain we came to an executive decision that it was the PC and that there is nothing wrong with the rest of the system, it must be the PC.

It was very exciting seeing all 3 axis's moving nice and smooth, so very cool

Thanks to all for your responses.
Will post with results after the weekend.

[300magnum]

Hi there, PROBLEM SOLVED, I went through the processes on the following link, reconfigured my PC and hey presto it is all working fine, very cool.

Thanks for everyones input.
Have a look at this if you are having similar problems.
http://www.machsupport.com/optimisation%20XP.txt

Cheers