Losing X steps, stepper to small??

[matth]

That's what I'm thinking but my controller box has a whopping 120mm fan that blows like a hurricane over the heatsinks of my drivers.
I'll post a piccy of the box tomorrow and I'll try to moniter the temps of the three drivers whilst performing a long job.

[matth]

Well I've found the problem.

The laptop that is running Mach3 was turning the moniter off after 25mins. This simple action was interupting the parallel port/Mach just long enough for the stepper to lose syncronisation and stall the axis. Once the axis was commanded to run again off it went.

A simple and free fix!

[project5k]

darn that power saver setting!

[pminmo]

Why would the power saver cause a problem? I would think the mach3 engine would handle system interrupts with no issue.

[project5k]

well to be honest, im not sure why, but i know that if i leave a program running that is processor cycle dependant, when the time comes to "power off monitors" it causes some glitching.... i would have to guess that its a combination of windows ediocyncries and processor usage... i'll try it sometime while watching my processor usage % and see if i can find anything... when i know that im going to be using something that is very time based and processor dependant i reset my screen savers and powersaver settings so that they dont activate... it might be a little hard on the old crt's to leave the images up for that long, but i would rather have to replace a monitor a little sooner (which i seem to do regularly anyway) rather than have something that i have left grinding away for hours get messed up...

[ger21]

Originally Posted by pminmo Why would the power saver cause a problem? I would think the mach3 engine would handle system interrupts with no issue.

While Mach pretty much takes control of Windows to do it's thing, it doesn't have the ability to block other processes from interfering with what it's doing. On a very fast PC, it may not be a problem, but on slower PC's, it may not take much at all to interfere. Mach can be pretty CPU intensive, may and not have much headroom available for any other tasks.

[fyffe555]

I don't know how much control mach3 takes, or what the priority is as installed on your systems but I do know the XP 'background' processes run at a higher base priority than the applications. I've had a message queuing problem that was caused by a high priority system process jumping in over the top of the application and loosing sync. I'd suspect the power funtion is a system priority - i.e. base priority 'high' ? might account for the apparent problem.

having said that Art is a smart guy and I'm sure he's covered this.

To test it, in 2k and XP you can set the base priority from the task manager, taskmanager/processes right click the process (mach3?) and take the bottom option 'set priority' and set it to 'high' or 'realtime'

I'm not a knowlegable user of Mach3 so this might be irrelevant but my install shows the priority as normal..

[ger21]

I know if your network card speed is set to "auto", it'll mess up Mach3. So will Quicktime if it's installed on your system.

[pminmo]

Mach3 forum says the screen saver has to be turned off.