new 201 system

[rickwinters]

Hi All,

I just built a camtronics stepper controller. Wiring looks good and I've set my printer port pins in Mach 2. I hooked up the X axis stepper and launched the test program "spiral.txt".

Ugh. Major anti-climax - nothing, zero, zipo, nada movement. I don't have an ocsilloscope - only a multimeter. Do I need to tie the grounds together from the PC and the controller? What's the best method to troubleshoot this puppy????

[ViperTX]

The ground that you need should come through the parallel printer port cable....send Dan a message and he'll probably give you a FAQ.

[rickwinters]

Originally Posted by ViperTX The ground that you need should come through the parallel printer port cable....send Dan a message and he'll probably give you a FAQ.

My partner-n-crime wrote to Dan and the reply was not helpful. Any chance you have the pinouts from a sucessful gecko install?

[ViperTX]

rickwinters,

Here is one link look for the servo wiring diagram:
http://www.homecnc.info/servomotor.htm
Also for parallel port information if you want to understand how it works:
http://www.senet.com.au/~cpeacock

[swarfmacdaddy]

Rick, download and try turbocnc3 as i had a problem not unlike yours. No matter what i did my mill would not work.I bought deskam for dos, mach and nothing! then out of boredom i tried turbo and BAM!! It works!(well) I dont know why but the others still dont work. But the turbo does. This may be of no help but its worth a try.maybe it has a more robust pulse generator, i dont know as im a newbie. I do know it works fine even with a 25 foot cable from the lpt to the drives and i dont even have a buffer card on my cheap ass e-machine. Just the stock printer port. And everything ive read says keep the db25 cable as short as possible.let me know how it goes.

[swarfmacdaddy]

Rick, I noticed the heading on your post said "new 201" is that 201 as in gecko g201? Cuz you also stated that you just built the new camtronics controller. Which i believe is a stand alone controller.

[ger21]

Just call Mariss at Gecko. He'll help you until you get it working.