I finally got a smooth stepper for my mill after 7 years. Finally got the axis working thanks to John's help over New Years weekend! I have no control of my spindle now. I spent the whole weekend messing around with settings and only managed to get the spindle to either go 100 RPM or 4000 Rpm. Does anyone that has a smooth stepper (ethernet) on their Novakon have any tricks or tip for settings? Also, I still have the momentary stop of movement from line to line as I was hoping to do away with by upgrading to the ESS.
First, get the ESS installation manual from Novakon. It details every single setting to get everything working as it should.
Second, if you are getting a stop between each line of g-code, you are almost certainly set for exact stop mode, which has nothing to do with the ESS. In Mach3, go to Config->GeneralConfig->MotionMode, and set it to Constant Velocity.
Thanks for the reply Ray. John from Novakon gave me the install manual and followed that to the T and I have my settings to constant velocity. Do I need a new XML file or should my existing one be working fine or do i need to modify it?
The XML files in Mach3 do sometimes get clobbered in a way that they cannot be corrected, but must be either replaced with a good one, or reconfigured from scratch. Just one of the many joys of Mach3. I'd suggest getting a good XML from someone with identical hardware, or as close as you can get.
John should be able to e-mail you one that should work.
kvom - I just purchased a lightly used NM200 R2 with ESS that had some electrical issues, and a pile of test .xml files the previous owner created/saved while debugging. If you had/have the same machine as mine, could I get a copy of the Mach23 configuration from you?
Smooth Stepper on Novakon NM-200
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