Short pauses during milling operations

[Nanoid314]

Hello, this is my first post on this board, though I have been lurking for a while. I have tried searching, but while I did find a few threads that seemed promising, none of the solutions applied to my situation:

I have been having some issues with my Wabeco mill. During program cycles, the operation will pause for about a quarter of a second and then resume.
The mill came with pre-installed stepper motors, but the rest of the electronics I have installed myself. I am using a Pokeys57CNC motion controller (ethernet) and generic chinese stepper drivers. I have been through two other motion controllers as I thought that was the source of the problems (and since I had a hard time understanding the translated chinese documentation).

At first I thought there was binding in the ways, but the Mach3 DROs pause along with the machine, so now I'm leaning towards a computer problem. I'm using a (powerful) laptop for controlling the mill, since I can then do CAD stuff on it as well (I don't do that while the machine is running). I'm wondering if too much other stuff is going on on the laptop which is connected to internet and doubtless has a great number of background processes running. However, I was under the impression that a motion controller was able to buffer the commands to the machine, and thereby remove the issues with Windows running machines in real time.

If necessary, I can buy a dedicated PC (or better drivers or whatever), but I would prefer to find the actual problem before I replace anything else, so if someone here has any ideas as to what my problem might be, I would be grateful.

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[peterwinter]

a dedicated computer would be best ,yes things running in the background absolutely can cause output inconsistency i had a uc100 interface from computer to bob and it would shut down whenever my computer hiccuped

[Nanoid314]

Thanks for the reply. What kind of specs do you have on your PC? AFAIK, even low end CPUs are fine for mach3, but what about the graphics card? RAM? I suppose that the GPU is more of a concern with regards to CAD than actual machine control. How about internet/network access - do you run your system disconnected from the outside world?

[ger21]

I would ask the Pokeys people.
With an ethernet controller, you shouldn't be seeing pauses like that.