[tosh.jones]

Hello,

I am setting up a CNC with one of those Longs-Motor Kits. I have watched a lot of youtube videos and found a lot of documentation of the wiring and everyone is pretty much doing it the same way. I get the green light on my stepper drives and my motors have holding torque when the system is on. I have an external power supply for the BOB that turns on a green LED. I have a Dell Precision 380 that has a integrated parallel port that I am running windows 7 32bit on. I have verified the address of the parallel port and it's the standard 0x378. I have gone into the BIOS and set it up for ECP. I have run the DriverTest program that comes when you download mach3 and it says my system is excellent. I have adjusted the setting in Mach3 so I don't have emergency stop issues. In the diagnostics screen on Mach3 I also have no lights on under the "Port 1 Pins current state." I have checked the voltages coming out of the pins and get absolutely 0v on everything. Maybe I am not checking the voltages right or something. I am not sure what to try to get it to work. I am fairly confident in my wiring and the set up post computer. I really think the problem is on the computer side.

Thanks for any help!

[O_Clark]

Should the parallel setting not be EPP? I may be completely off base but I thought that there were subtle differences and that EPP was for non printer/scanner peripherals whereas ECP was.

[tosh.jones]

I am not completely sure. I just changed it to EPP and ran the drivertest program and it says my system is excellent. I still have the same issues as before with no output from the parallel port. However I did notice that when when I booted up my computer the green LED was dimly light on my BOB. Once I opened mach3 it went away, this was before I turned on my external power supply to the BOB which makes the green LED come on full power.

[O_Clark]

Checking the external supply was going to be my next question! I am not very experienced with Mach3 but the first thing I would check is that the pins were all correctly defined as output and not input. With a basic multimeter if some are set to output direction then you should be able to monitor a swing from high to low when jog direction of that axis is changed. I wouldn't connect any motors or drivers until you can measure that.