Built a simple step controller with a PC glitch? (now cannot get Mach3 to work)

[mrgadgeteer]

Hi Everyone, great site! I just built this controller last evening (1 axis) and ran it with Kcam. http://www.ozitronics.com/docs/k179.pdf I substituted IRF510's for the MOSFET's due to the IRFZ's being out of stock at my local vendor.

It works, however the motor "interrupts" a few times per rev. I suspect this may be a PC/software clocking problem because when I run via the internal stepping clock it runs smooth. I've shutdown tons of system services and resident applications. Its a PIII-500 running XP

Any suggestions?
Mike

[mrgadgeteer]

Ok, note to self, Mach3 will bring a PII-500 to it's miserable legacy knees and hang. Back to the storage room she goes.

I hooked up the "Big Gun" PC, a 2.4GHz with 3G's of RAM running Vista. Kcam working fine but stepper still has a "pulse" noise. Only improvement is that Kcam program does not "hang" on other PC or mouse activity.

Fine, then I installed the Mach3 Trial, configured parallel port pin 2 as step and 3 as direction (same as my working Kcam settings) and E-stop is set to Emulated - using no physical inputs. When I enable Jog and use the manual Jog buttons the X axis readout increments or decrements accordingly but the stepper is motionless and no logic changes are noted on the breakout board.

My assumption is Mach3 "thinks" it's moving the stepper but perhaps I missed a certain setting? Mach3 has soooo many settings....

Can someone who knows the in's and out's of Mach3 help me out?

[mrgadgeteer]

My bad, neglected to define the parallel port #. Working WAYYYY better than Kcam does, so I'll continue my controller design using Mach3 for the time being. Nothing worse when debugging hardware only to find it was the software!