[Elektroniker]

Hi all,

as a first post in this group I may first indroduce myself.

I'm an design engineer in the field of embedded computing. My hobbies are building and flying model aircrafts and helicopters and shaping metal. Mostly I'm using my mill and lathe for creating parts for my model hobby.
Last year I converted my SX3 to CNC and replaced my 30 year old lathe with a 250 x 500 one.

The parts are designed with ViaCad and converted to g-code with CamBam. The SX3 is controlled by a laptop runnig Mach3.

Have a nice day
Wolfgang

[yours_prabhat]

warm welcome sir .. The mach 3 you are using , how do you feel about the ease of access for ?

[Elektroniker]

I feel comfortable with this software. A lot of problems arise with the usage of the parallel ports of laptops and the low cpu speed leads to unstable kernel pulse frequencies. So I decided in an early state to switch to usb smoothstepper which I'm using without any problems now. With an additional parallelport it was easy to add an MPG for manually steering the mill.

With the help of the manual and some infomations for the smoothstepper I succeeded in configuring Mach3 to run flawless. At the moment I'm trying to adapt the spindle speed controller to Mach3.

[roundrocktom]

Wolfgang - Welcome.

What type of metal shaping? I took a four day intensive aluminum forming class, and after three days of swinging mallets and hammers was grateful to use a power hammer for shaping!

I ran into the same issue with MACH3. Laptop was not stable due to power management features saving battery life by changing frequency of the system. So I replaced it with a desktop (Dell G620 running WinXP) and parallel port works fine. Smooth stepper on the list of things to do.

Tom

[Elektroniker]

Hi Tom,

with metal shaping I ment drilling, milling and turning aluminium and mild steel.

My old IBM T23 laptop is doing well when all of battery saving features and the screen saver as well are deactivated. But the kernel pulse frequency showed big variations with every access to the harddisc, virus checker, LAN communication an so on. Nearly ervery milltask became intterrupted in the middle of the work. This drove me crazy. With smoothstepper all of these problems were gone.

Wolfgang

[roundrocktom]

Hi Tom,

with metal shaping I ment drilling, milling and turning aluminium and mild steel.

Wolfgang

Aha, building something for the Schützenverein! :cheers:

Tom