Mach3 Motion Devices and Probing Support

[DaveCVI]

Many potential MSM customers asl about the compatibility of Various external motion devices for Mach. In this post is what CVI has learned from assisting various MSM customers with different external motion devices. The info is as current and accurate as we could make it as of when it is posted. Because some of the information comes to CVI 2nd hand, CVI can not guarantee that this information is 100% accurate.

Company: Artsoft USA
Device: Mach3’s Parallel port driver
Status: No known probing problems.
This is the “gold Standard” for Mach; This defines the behavior expected from other motion control devices.


Company: Warp9 Tech Design Inc.
Device: Smooth Stepper (Ethernet or USB)
Status: no known problems with current firmware
(early firmware had bugs that have been fixed).


Company: Galil
Devices: Those Galil models supported by the Mach3 with Galil Plug-in available from Artsoft.
Status: Depends on the revision of the plug-in being used.
G31 G91 mode – this mode did not work in the galil plug-in but has been fixed in recent revisions.
G31 current position causes a failure in the galil plug-in. (maybe fixed recently, check with the plug-in authors).

The most recent versions of the Galil plug-in do not seem to be posted on the Machsupport site. If you are interested in Galil controls, contact CVI and we’ll put you ion contact with the Galil plug-in author


Company: Ajax CNC
Devices: Ajax controls for mach3
Status: Probing in mach does not work. Ajax has been contacted and informed of the technical issue involved. They have acknowledged that they did not follow the mach conventions and they have said they did so intentionally, and that they have no intention of fixing this in their mach plug-in.
Conclusion: Ajax controls will never work correctly with mach for probing operations.


Company: Various Chinese venders
Devices: USB Breakout Board (leafboy77)
Status: MSM users have reported many problems with these boards when attempting to do probing. The same mach/MSM combinations that work correctly on PP and Smooth Stepper boards, fails with these boards.
Additionally, CVI has received reports of these boards randomly causing unexpected motion.

Company: CS-Labs
Devices: CSMIO/IP-6 Ethernet motion controllers
Other devices from CS-Labs: Other devices have not been tested first hand. Since they all appear to use a common plug-in, we would expect the other motion control product to have the same bugs.
Status: These controller almost works correctly. Unfortunately the two bugs exhibited by these controllers are show stoppers for MSM.

Known Bug #1: A bug in the CSMIO plug-in breaks mach’s scritp preprocessing handling of #expand. The result is that no script that uses #expand can run on this controller. The bug was not present in plug-in 1.350 but is present in all later plug-ins (as of Aprl-5-2013). Since essentially all MSM scripts use the mach #expand feature, essentially all MSM scripts are broken by this control's plug-in.

Known Bug #2: The controller will not execute gcode correctly during an M6 sequence; the controller throws a “ePID fault” and goes into estop. This does not happen for M6 executed from MDI. For MSM this means that the controller fault when attempting to for a probe sequence to measure a tool during a tool change (M6).

Both technical problems have been reported in detail (including test cases for the bugs) to CS-Labs. To date they have not fixed the problems.

Conclusion: If you can stick to plug-in 1.350 (Bug #1) and you don’t need MSM’s ATLO features (Bug #2), it has been verified that all other MSM probing operations work fine on this control.

Other Devices:
If you want to test a new motion device, The attached paper gives some info about Mach3 Motion devices and some basic tests for a motion device's G31 implementation. Be aware that the basic tests are necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate compatibility with the mach parallel port driver.

[hyperlitz]

Sorry to drag this topic up again but I am interested in getting an ethernet smooth stepper, the one I was keen on was either the Soigernis SSEC 2 or their Gecko 540 based full control unit but as I am in England it's quite a big step with the distance and import tax.So I know you can't test all units but wondered if you had any knowledge of these in relation to MSM.Also I was interested how CS labs fare these days as I can get these easier.
Hope somebody can help me.
Regards Bob.

[DaveCVI]

Hi,

Sorry to drag this topic up again but I am interested in getting an ethernet smooth stepper, the one I was keen on was either the Soigernis SSEC 2 or their Gecko 540 based full control unit but as I am in England it's quite a big step with the distance and import tax.So I know you can't test all units but wondered if you had any knowledge of these in relation to MSM.

The Smooth stepper is a product of Warp9TD and Soigernis is a reseller of the product. I am not aware of any problems with the Enet smooth stepper and mach 3 + MSM. The Gecko 540 is also known to work, but if I remember correctly, there is a small issue with using pull up resistors and the 540 (as I remember,+5 is not avail on the connectors to connect the pul up resister to). Search the forum here for 540 info and it should turn up.

Also I was interested how CS labs fare these days as I can get these easier.
Hope somebody can help me.
Regards Bob.

AS far as I know, the CS labs products are still broken and they refuse to fix it 0 in fact they have been rude about it - which I find to be an undesirable attitude wrt to product support. If you are interested in probing, I would stay far away from anything built by CS Labs.

Dave

[hyperlitz]

Many thanks Dave i'll certainly stay away from the CS labs and try to see what the warp 9 requires to make it work for me as in this format it outputs straight into my control box through the parallel port the only other question for me would be the whole hog of ethernet input and Gecko drive in one box, more costly but perhaps more flexible in the long term with more inputs but the problem of the resisters that is surely fixable.
Regards.