Download Mach3 For Windows 10
Therese Cowden
Regardless of how much Physical Memory (RAM) your PC has, windows will use Virtual Memory, which is just empty space on your hard drive. Normally Windows allocates a small amount of space on your drive, and grows it over time as the operating system needs to transfer more and more program information there from your Physical Memory. Expanding and contracting the size of Virtual Memory takes time and can cause communication errors between Mach and the SmoothStepper along with other random slowness or non-responsiveness. To solve this we will modify the Initial and Maximum amount of Virtual Memory available, so they are the same, and much larger than what Windows normally provides. This procedure is for Windows 7, but the other versions of windows will be very similar.
Hi Greg
It could be a configuration or a bent pin. The controller documentation should say which pin needs setting in Mach3. Have a look at this -axis-cnc-hot-wire-configuration-for-tb6560-and-mach3/ post here where I showed how I set my board up.
I would suspect its configuration.
Keith
I've been working with a CNC router myself lately using a realtime linux kernel, the issue you're seeing is the lack of realtime preemption in windows xp. I can't view the Mach3 stuff from here, but the only way it should be able to work is by using a "kernel level" driver in windows. (sorry, I'm not really a windows person, so I don't really know specifics). Writing some sort of driver to bypass windows default preemption model is your answer though, i would start by learning a bit about windows drivers and maybe looking at the realtime patches for the linux kernel for reference.
Any timer you can build on windows that will run at the required speed is going to be CPU bound. It's not that the compute CPU can't handle it, but you have to think about the rest of the moving parts on your computer. To get a reliable 100 kHz signal from software emulation to a hardware I/O signaling on standard hardware is quite a task. You will I/O bound a core just to get the right signal pattern.
I get the feeling that this an attempt to use an Arduino as that interface. to allow MACH to send out the USB signals and the Arduino to see them, then control the stepping of the motors.
I have to agree with Robin2 on this. although the Arduino can, and will be used for this, I would search for someone who has done this and see if their code is open source.
the other alternatives is to use an older PC, or at least an older windows.
you can get a dedicated PC with an old version of windows for next to nothing.
I have successfully recreated the hello echo-world board we were supposed to start with. I packed all the eagle files and libraries in this zip file. To use them in windows, just unzip into your windows Documents/eagle folder. Then it should appear like this:
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