Steppers do not run smooth under KCAM

[dfansler]

Greetings - my first post. I have put together a stepper motor controlled slide table (x and y). I built the parallel breakout box with some additional features - such as using a pendent to control the direction and speed of the two axis, plus the z axis on the drill press. All of these motions are smooth as silk under manual control. Last night I hooked up a laptop (IBM ThinkPad A20) running XP Pro and KCAM. I got all the motions to work in the correct direction and was working on the scaling of the steps per inch. The table is incosistant in the results (using a dxf file to move the axis 1.00 inch and measuring with a caliper). The steppers appear to be jerking under KCAM control. Looking at the pulses coming from the parallel port, there is indeed a break in the pulse train rather than a continous stream of pulses as I would have expected.

Has anyone else run into this? I really like KCAM and will pruchase it, if I can get the steppers to smooth out. I plan on doing some PCBs in the near future and the Gerber import is just what I need.

I looked at the past posts but did not see anything that was similiar to my problem.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
David

[dertsap]

kcam isnt a very smooth software
mach or emc2 are far better control softwares

[SPARKIE.M]

Hi, this is quite normal for Kcam, if you look on there web page and goto there forum you will see a fix for this. Also i think a desk top computer works better then a laptop for port timing or something like that. (i remember reading it on a forum someware.)
Good luck, Kcam works great for me and is very very easy to setup and use.

[s3648]

Hey David,

Your post caught my eye because when I first built my controller board I tried to use my thinkpad A-20 and had all kinds of problems. I etched and built my own circuit board and thought my problems were related to that. Just before I thought of smashing my controller board to small pieces with a hammer I tried an old desktop PC my wife had in her sewing room and it ran K-cam perfectly. I know not everyone has spare computers laying around but I thought I would share my story with you.

Good Luck

SteveP

[Bryan1]

Two nights ago I finally hooked up my shed puter to the cnc project I'm making, the puter is an old 1 gig celery cpu with 1.5gig of ram and it runs perfect. When i first hooked everything up the stepper motor was jittering as soon as I plugged the step/direction leads to my interface board. It had me puzzled for ages then I thought I didnt have a common ground between the steeper board, constant current circuit and the interface board. I put a jumper wire in and the stepper stopped the jittering straight away.

It could be the ground is too stable on your board so check to see if that is the problem.

Cheers Bryan