Anyone able to drive a G540 with a thinkpad?

[coltz]

I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to drive a G540 board and two steppers from a thinkpad t61 running XP + mach3 (I've tried a t60 and a t40 as well). I've not had much luck. The motors will often spin, but then periodically lock up. I've put the velocity & accel down low and it doesn't eliminate the problem.

The main suggestion I've seen is switching ACPI (sp?) to "standard PC", which locked up windows and I had to reinstall(!).

I put the printer port to ECP since there doesn't seem to be an EPP.

Have people had success w/ ubuntu? I could try that if need be.


Thanks for any insight!

[LeeWay]

I use an R40 on my mill.
It is still loaded with the original XP and the IBM bloatware.
I used the XP Opto file from Mach 3 and then went back through and removed and disabled other stuff that I knew I wouldn't need.
I went through the BIO's as well. There were several different places that I had to disable the hibernation and power saving features. There were some in the BIO's, some in XP and then a couple in the IBM stuff. I had issues right up until I located each and every one of those. It would run for an hour and then the screen would time out locking everything up before. Once all done though, it is likely the most reliable computer I use out of three. When I get a power failure sometimes, it doesn't loose place. I'm talking the short power outage that lasts a second or two. Had three of those in the past few months.
Luckily it has been sitting idle between cycles when this occurs though. If it were another machine, it may have been crash city.

[coltz]

Hi Lee,

thanks for the pointers! I'll try the opto file to see if that helps. Rebuilding the machine was a lot easier than getting the damn motors to work from my laptop...

Originally Posted by LeeWay I use an R40 on my mill. It is still loaded with the original XP and the IBM bloatware. I used the XP Opto file from Mach 3 and then went back through and removed and disabled other stuff that I knew I wouldn't need. I went through the BIO's as well. There were several different places that I had to disable the hibernation and power saving features. There were some in the BIO's, some in XP and then a couple in the IBM stuff. I had issues right up until I located each and every one of those. It would run for an hour and then the screen would time out locking everything up before. Once all done though, it is likely the most reliable computer I use out of three. When I get a power failure sometimes, it doesn't loose place. I'm talking the short power outage that lasts a second or two. Had three of those in the past few months. Luckily it has been sitting idle between cycles when this occurs though. If it were another machine, it may have been crash city.