Thread: My Chinese CNC Saga (continued)

more screen shots might help

system hot key setup for your pendent

on the main screen , the pendent wont work unless you have the "Jog ON/OFF " button yellowed , centre bottom of screen

Right well,

I just had the controller on, and was in Mach3 just resetting the pendant hotkeys to try and see if i could get them registering on the diagnostic screen. I hit 'OK' to save them, and the RCD on my shed subboard threw, and a little puff of smoke came out of the side of the controller box

This was before i got your post with all the new screenshots. Do I dare switching it all on again and trying with all your settings? My BIL said the first time he tried to power the box up, his RCD went as well, but then when he tried again later, it was working fine and he couldn't get it to do it again.

Originally Posted by SawDustSniffer

when you press the stop button on the control box , do's it show up on the mach3 screen ?

try a pc reboot

Garding this, no it doesn't show up. Ive turned on emulation and it registers from the pendant OK that way, naturally. I've re-booted several times.

not good about the smoke
edit: what side did it come out ?


on the main screen , the pendent wont work unless you have the "Jog ON/OFF " button yellowed , centre bottom of screen

Well,the CNC powers up still, and the pump still runs. Can't see any scorch marks on anything, but whether some component has burnt out or not, I have no idea. The smoke had to have come from somewhere.

But for now, it's a moot point. Looks my MoBo or something has blown in the PC, as it starts up, gives one normal beep, the CMOS setup line briefly displays, but then the PC powers off again. Tried seravl things to get it to power up r go into CMOS setup, but it just keeps switching off again Don't think i have a mobo I can cannabilise from my old gear, but either way, that'll probably keep me busy for the next several days at least.

let it cool down
unplug the cnc controller , all extra USB stuff
power supply browning out? , unplug the power on every thing in side the case you dont need ,like DVD players extra drives ect , if it boots , plug them all back in and see if fails again

Originally Posted by SawDustSniffer

unplug the cnc controller , all extra USB stuff
power supply browning out? , unplug the power on every thing in side the case you dont need ,like DVD players extra drives ect , if it boots , plug them all back in and see if fails again

Maybe. I did try unplugging everything, including the DVD and HDD, which are the only things connected internally apart from the Video card, and it is even worse - doesn't even beep, although that may because I didn't gie it a 30 second break between powering up. I've come back inside and brought all the PC gear inside, so I'll start from square one and find out what's gone. Power supply would be the simplest, but given it was getting past there, I suspect either the CPU has died, the CMOS (although it was displaying the setup line, so I think not) or something on the MoBo itself that is preventing further startup. If the CMOS isn't blown, you'd think it'd at least get into the setup, so it seems a fundamental flaw.

Things not going well. I have 3 old PC's to canabalize.

One has the same MoBo, but won't post at all, so it may be stuffed too.

One works perfectly, but has no parallel port. Do the USB to parallel converters work well, or is the USB speed throttled too much to be reliable?

The other may work, but it has no graphics card, and due to standards changes, I can't use one from another box.

Time to scrounge through the bits box and see if anything might just get me through.

Originally Posted by BoomerangInfo

One works perfectly, but has no parallel port. Do the USB to parallel converters work well, or is the USB speed throttled too much to be reliable?

The USB to Parallel port adapters dont work.

Something about not being able to generate the pulses in real time, or well thats what I remember.

But you should be able to use a PCI parallel port card.

Well it seems my options are either a new pci-e card for my computer with a parallel port, or a pci parallel card for my pc with no parallel port.

The other two with parallel ports both seem to have shot motherboards it seems. I can't get either of them to POST so I can track the problems any further.

Some further investigation on the original machine that died. When I tried to power it on again, I managed to get it to stay up long enough to get into the CMOS settings, and I tried to load fail-safe defaults, or optimised defaults. Each time I save & exit though, the machine powers down and doesn't restart. Maybe the CMOS non-volatile RAM has been zapped, so whenever it tries to update, it's killing the machine. Anyway, it looks like a deadend trying to revive that one.

Cheapest options I've found is a PCI to parallel card from China, but I'll chafe at the delay in getting it. Still, $5 there or $40 here for the same thing. I can get a graphics card here for about $25 is the cheapest 2nd hand I can see, or $28 - $25 from somewhere like uMart, but I can't get there to pick it up. Wird the graphics cards are cheaper than a simple parallel port.

Anyway, the one from china is here

IEEE 1284 DB25 25Pin Parallel Port Printer to PCI I/O Controller Card Adapter #2 | eBay

They also have one here DB25 25Pin IEEE 1284 Parallel Port Printer to PCI I/O Controller Card Adapter #1 | eBay with the description basically the same, but the pictures are 2 different cards. Can anyone see what the difference might be? The price is the same. I assume PCI is just as good as PCI-E?

Thanks.

lol i bought a HP compac off ebay for $75 and $25 post , dont spend too much

pentium4 ,2.4ghz single core , with 2gig ram , dvd , 500meg drive , and the best bit 2x parallel ports , well worth $50 a parallel port
with 17inch moniter ( im useing a 22 inch ,) keyboard and mouse

might look for a spare , in 4 years time you wont find a parallel port on a ebay cheep and nasty

edit
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/HP-DC7100...ht_3390wt_1139 reconed for $69 delivered , have a mate in the" it" busness who said there bullit proof , never see them in for repairs and they solld millions of them , this model only has 1 parallel port , mines a bit older

edit again , i just bought 1 as a spare , 1 left

Originally Posted by SawDustSniffer

edit
HP DC7100 P4 3.0/512MB/40GB/DVD/XP Desktop PC Computer | eBay reconed for $69 delivered , have a mate in the it busness who said there bullit proof , never see them in for repairs and they solld millions of them , this model only has 1 parallel port , mines a bit older

edit again , i just bought 1 as a spare , 1 left

Heh, yeah that is a crazy price isn't it. I think I used one of these at work once Still, for $69 I could get 2 of my out of action PC's working again. Is the 240W power supply in these sufficient? No extra's needing to be added later that could overload it?

Speaking of power supplies, I had one more attempt at getting my zapped PC working. I noticed the longer I leave it turned off, the longer it will run before powering down again. I managed to get a CMOS change, a reboot and a detection of an unformatted drive, before it stopped again. So I figured maybe the powersupply was overheating, or some switch was throwing. So I swapped with one of my other power suppliers, but no go, same problem. Maybe a capacitor on the motherboard is faulty or something. I think I've eliminated everything except the mobo now.

*EDIT*

Just noticed those ebay machines only have 512Mb RAM. It's probably DDR2? I only have DDR3 and above RAM I think. Is 512Mb sufficient for CNC purposes?

to just run cnc it would be fine ,needs a graphics card , yer more ram would be nice , and the hard drive is small at 40meg ( got a few laying around larger and 2x 1gig sticks of DDR2 ) but as a spare im happy with it , i use this other PC for CAD and CAM , 4x 2.8ghz 8gig ram , lol 6terra storage , and a 6gig 570core tesla card

yes DDR2 ram , cheep as chips now

lol im drawing a violin in CAD what a night mere , only have 5000 mesh points to set to a z hight , the auto sweep doe's it wrong in Turbo Cad
the reason i bought this CNC machine was because it was cheep and i need one to make moulds ,
my first carbon fibre violin > https://www.woodworkforums.com/f98/vi...cratch-110427/

edit again , min specks for mach 3 Desktop (using the parallel port)

32-bit version of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 Operating System (64-bit will not work)
1Ghz CPU
512MB RAM
Non-integrated Video Card with 32MB RAM
Basic Computer Skills (ability to copy/rename files, browse directories, etc)

lol at the basic computer skills , lol , yer find out what port your running , and have a basic idear about how the i/o instruction to parallel works ( out of date ) if i dint screw around with I/O in visualbasic in the late 1990's , i'd be stuffed
the parallel port is tricky ,the stuff you dont see with mach3 will drive you up the wall if you want pin 1 you ask for 1 , pin 2 = 2 , pin3 = 4 ,pin 5 = 8 pin6 = 16 , pin 7 =32 , lol , now if you want pin 1 and 2 on at the same time you have to ask for 3( binary numbers 1-255 + 0) , and how the hell they have programmed all of the out puts to work floorlessly when the pins are changing constantly is beyond me , well worth the licence fee