g540 w/ Mach3, Can't get motors to move.

[speeddemon974]

Hey Guys, I'm trying to test the electronics for my CNC router. I have the g540, Nema 23 motors, power supply from CNCrouterparts, and am running Mach3 on Windows 7.

I went through the setup instructions, wired port 12 to V-, port 11 to V+, and I don't have my E-stop button yet so port 10 straight to V- for now as well. After plugging the 4 motors, disabling the charge pump, and powering up. I get a green power LED on the G540 and holding Torque on the motors.


So everything good up to this point.


Now on the computer end, I set the parallel port to EPP in the BIOS, plug in the cable and load up Mach3 with the 540BVFD.xml file (from the gecko website). Hit the reset button on bottom left, then I use the arrow keys to try and jog the motors, the numbers on the screen change but no motor movement. Then if I flip the charge pump switch on I get a red fault light on the g540 and loose holding torque.

I used an Ohm meter to check all 25 pins on the parallel port cable and they're all good. So far the only indication that I have that there is a connection from the PC to motors is when I go into the device manager settings for the parallel port and change the LPT port # the sound from the motors (with the holding torque) stops and starts again sometimes with a different pitch.

Does anyone have any idea of what might be wrong? How would I test to make sure there is signal coming from the computer?

[ger21]

Did you enter the correct port address in Mach3?

[speeddemon974]

Originally Posted by ger21 Did you enter the correct port address in Mach3?

Yea, the 540B.xml took care of that stuff. It looked like it was definitely a problem on the computer end, after running out of ideas I installed XP on that machine (it was on windows 7), hooked everything back up and it worked perfectly.

thanks for the help

[ger21]

Originally Posted by speeddemon974 Yea, the 540B.xml took care of that stuff.

The .xml file has no idea what your port address is. You just got lucky that it matched.

[speeddemon974]

Originally Posted by ger21 The .xml file has no idea what your port address is. You just got lucky that it matched.

Ooohh ok, I thought you were talking about the pins. Yea the parallel port address was correct by default with the 378 address. in my tinkering I changed the parallel port address in the BIOS and Mach3 to 278, but that didn't make any difference so I switch back to the defaults.

Thanks again for the suggestion. Since it seemed like it was a communication problem between mach 3 and the gecko controller, having the wrong port address could have definitely caused the problem.

[morestuff]

Installing Windows XP probably did the trick because your Windows 7 installation was for 64 bit mode. The parallel port driver in Mach 3 can only function in 32 bit mode under Windows 7.

Regards,
Steve Stallings
www.PMDX.com