Member postings for Nealeb

Speaking personally and purely thinking about ease of use, I would put OnShape at the top of the list. At least, when I started using it some years ago. However, I now use F360 for 3D printing - more powerful but a bit more difficult to learn. I also use Solid Edge for more complex engineering modelling - even more powerful and even more difficult to learn. Tried FreeCAD way back but found it awkward and inconsistent. Probably lots better now but I've taken a different route.

l am not going down the it's not open source/it doesn't run on Linux/DOS/Windows 95/Raspberry Pi/they will draw you in and then make you pay/they suddenly take all the best bits out of the free version/it puts money into Bill Gates's pocket/they want to steal your ideas/it's in the cloud/it's not in the cloud rabbit holes. But I confidently expect them to come up...

Biggest issue with this tramming game I have found, on both a Warco VMC and a Wabeco 1400 which both have variations on swivellling heads, is less about how to measure any errors and more about how to move the head under control to remove them. Usually ends up with soft-faced hammer on a non-critical part of the head, but it's not something I like doing to the machine, especially when there is a DTI in place to show the movement. And then re-clamping without the head moving...

FWIW, my initial question was aimed at the OP - my own DRO works perfectly! However, as pointed out by others, I did forget the step of specifying the axis to halve - otherwise how does the DRO know which axis?

This does make me think, though, that the effect described in the original question could happen if you hit the "X0" button when you are selecting the axis rather than "X", say.

It is, perhaps, slightly misleading to call the "1/2" button the "centre finder". While that's what everyone uses it for, actually all it does is halve the value in the display, hence its name on the front panel. Really useful, all the same!

Can you explain how you are using it? I cannot find an online manual for this model.

I have an Easson display (also from M-dro) where the sequence is:

- Pick up one edge and zero axis readout

- pick up opposite edge and press 1/2 button.

That halves the value in the readout, which is the equivalent of putting zero at the mid-point of the work and works whether you initially zero at the + or - side of the work.

Is yours similar or does it work differently?

I decided in the end to go with the PlanetCNC option. No, it does not have the CSS feature (at least, not yet) but I think it does have feed per rev, and supports a shaft encoder for speed control and threading. I might have been swayed by the LinuxCNC/Mesa option and accepted the work involved in setting it all up, but the desirable Mesa cards seem unavailable (according to the Mesa web site) and I'm not that happy with the idea of continuing use of tthe parallel port. I'm now collecting all the bits I need to get installing sometime soon.

The ELS+extras solution seems less desirable for a from-the-ground-up CNC lathe as opposed to upgrading from a manual machine which is a different story. In fact, I have been thinking for a long time about an ELS addition to my Smart and Brown to allow easy imperial threading on a metric machine, and to simplify metric threading as well (nice-to-use threading gearbox but stil have to change the TDI gear for some pitches).

Yes, it's still there. I'm relatively new to the area and currently chairman of the Newton Abbot club. The exhibition is mainly OO gauge but we do our best to promote bigger gauges! Given that our club track is only a few miles from the library...

However, speaking as a club chairman, one of the issues is finding enough willing volunteers to actually do the considerable amount of work to make even a small exhibition work and in the end it tends to come down to the same small group who turn up to evening meetings, turn up on track maintenance morning, etc. And there is a limit to what that group can achieve bearing in mind that they are possibly the most active model engineer/loco building members of the club as well. I can understand why local exhibitions are thin on the ground, although best of luck to those who do run them.

I don't see any real difference between an AI interpretation and what a "natural language speaker" would make of it. Anyone who has written a proposal response to a customer requirement document will recognise this - as long as the proposal is in accordance with what the customer says they want, it's compliant. Of course, a good supplier will ask additional questions and deliver what the customer needs, not what they say they want. But in a public sector competitive bid, loophole engineering comes to the fore - why do so many public sector projects go pear-shaped? And if the bidder uses AI to assist the proposal writing, looks like all bets are off!

There will be a Garden Railway exhibition in Exeter this October and at least two local model engineering societies will be there. The library in Newton Abbot is also holding a railway-themed exhibition in December, associated with its specialist railway collection, and my own club in Newton Abbot will be exhibiting there. But we are a fair way down in the south west and the local model engineering population density is not that high! I used to go to the Bristol show, which was one of my personal favourites, but difficulties in organising, finding suitable premises, and attracting trade exhibitors all proved too much for a single club, even one the size of Bristol.

I spent most of my exhibition time on the SMEE stand but for me, when wandering around, the best bit was the chance to see the occasional part-complete model and, with a bit of luck, talk to its builder. The glossy exhibition-quality models are all very glamorous but even if I found something similar to my own loco under construction, if you couldn't get a good look at the hidden interesting details, it wasn't of that much interest. Personal opinion here! But at the forthcoming local exhibitions, my club will have at least one part-complete model on the stand to show what's under the covers.

Thanks for mentioning the talk, Duncan - I'm a sucker for anything that starts with "Dummy's guide..."

Actually, the talks programme looks quite interesting - something I would visit each day. Still, Friday is the only day I can make it - see you there!

But is that not exactly how ChatGPT works? It does not "understand" what it is saying; rather, it is an incredibly powerful engine that reads and analyses collections of words that it has found on the internet and repeats them. The way in which it does this is only a little short of miraculous in that it can extract some kind of query from what the user types in and can then find a form of words that is often very close to answering it. But at the end of the day it is an example of the old IT principle of "garbage in, garbage out" and if it "learns" from browsing the internet, it is always llikely to pick up a bit of dross from time to time. If it finds 100 entries saying that the earth is flat and only 1 saying that is it spherical, it is going to repeat accepted wisdom and gossip. After all, it must be true if you read it on Facebook...

I also use this technique on the mill - which is one that you cannot realistically use on a machine without DRO for position readout as backlash otherwise makes it unreliable using the handwheel dials. Unless you have very low backlash via ballscrews or similar - and that usually comes with CNC which is another can of worms!

I cheerfully used my Super 7 for years without a DRO but that all changed when I bought another lathe with DRO already installed. Apart from the tailstock, I doubt I've ever used the handwheel dials since - and especially for imperial machining on an otherwise metric lathe.

In my research I came across Eding CNC, which I found mentioned by someone who had set it up for a lathe. However, their website does not specifically mention lathe use; the nearest is something on the lines of, "...and through the use of specially-written macros, other machine types can be supported." In other words - you are on your own with this one!

CSLabs CSMIO motion controllers do support threading. That means one of their more expensive 6-axis controllers, plus the encoder extension module, plus their own "Pro" software, not the basic free version, to make it all work. Definitely not cheap, although I have used one of their controllers in the past and they are nicely put-together bits of kit.

After that, I reckon you are probably into the realms of much more expensive solutions aimed at commercial use.

CSS and feed per rev - as far as I can see, G96 CSS is not supported (based on a comment from PlanetCNC in a support forum post). I know it is listed in the PlanetCNC manual, but I don't think that it is implemented. All the same, I have just tried entering it as a command in my PlanetCNC software (in simulation mode - no machine connected) and it is accepted - so who knows? However, I think G95 feed per rev is there, together with spindle speed feedback via an encoder for accurate threading. Apart from something like facing a faceplate, I'm not sure how significant lack of CSS is - even with my variable-speed manual lathe, I haven't found much need for it in practice. But I'm sure to be proved wrong some time!

Edited By Nealeb on 21/09/2023 20:45:26

Edited By Nealeb on 21/09/2023 20:48:03

Thanks, Martin! I get so used to the "I wouldn't have done it like that!" comments on this and similar forums that a vote of confidence that I have actually taken a known and tested path is very encouraging. Not that I'm saying that anyone else is wrong, just that there are quite a few flavours of "right"...

I installed .028 last night as that happened to be on my laptop. Thanks for pointers to various parts of the interface that I had not taken on board - like the left arrow to get back to 1st "Auto" screen. The jogging problems that I had been seeing seem to have gone away although I'm not absolutely sure if that was not me knowing better how to drive it! However, threading still not working but by doing some more googling around the motion control card that is in there, I did discover that it is "limited" in its capabilities. I tried some threading code generated by the Mach3 wizard and although the spindle spun up, the saddle just sat there looking at me. I think that card is best summed up by one comment I found, "It's cheap and it mostly works."

However, sitting on my desk in front of me is a shiny new PlanetCNC motion control card that promises to fix all my issues and make the coffee at the same time. There's a 100PPR encoder on its way from China, and I need to sort out a PWM to analogue converter, plus various odds and ends like ribbon cable to screw terminal adaptors. The machine already has an MPG plus axis/jog speed switches mounted (but not wired) so they will be included. Plus proper e-stop, power/standby/ready switching, etc. So bye-bye Mach3...

I live in a house called Badgers Sett. Or should that be Badger's or Badgers'? Depending, I suppose, on whether Brock lived there as a bachelor or with his family? So when I came to make a house nameplate for the bottom of the drive, I went back to the earliest document I have relating to a previous property transfer, a legal document from around the 1950s. I found all three spellings in the same document. So I left out the apostrophe to match an existing sign on the house itself. This also matches the official Royal Mail listing for it - whether right or wrong...

Still, if it had to be one of the other, I would rather be burgled than burglarized!

John, Martin - thanks for the inputs.

I did have the right boxes ticked on the general config screen but I think Martin's comment re motion controller may well be correct. I have found virtually no information on the card that's in there so it's hardly mainstream; I did find the Mach3 plugin to install but that is about all the data I have on it. Everything else has been trial and error, with quite a lot of the latter. Probably intended for mill/router use so no lathe function support.

I have tried G94/G95 switching via the MDI but although the feed speed box changes its legend, I can't seem to get the speed to move off zero. I'll try again with your notes in hand.

I shall also try upgrading to .062!

This all sounds fairly familiar - a new bit of software like this seems very arcane and non-intuitive at first and then after a short while it becomes straightforward and you wonder why you ever had problems!

Thanks, John - I've had a hunt through all the config pages and done a lot of googling but I have a suspicion that there's a setting I've missed. The kind that's staring you in the face but you can't see until someone points it out to you...

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this with the new motion controller on order (together a spindle encoder to use with it) but if it's a matter of ticking the right box, I would like to see what the basic lathe hardware can do!

If you can, could you confirm which Mach3 revision you are using? I have several to hand from previous problem-chasing exercises with the software.

Thanks for the comments. I'm not a complete beginner with Mach3 - I used it with a CSLabs controller on my router until I moved to UCCNC and UC300, and on my mill where it was paired with an Ethernet SmoothStepper, now also replaced with UCCNC/UC300. Both for reasons more to do with the controllers than Mach3 itself. So an obvious choice for the lathe would have also been UCCNC/UC300 except that they are very clear that they do not yet support lathe use although it seems to have been under development for several years. I have some projects like that as well...

Still, Mach3 Turn is a new variant for me. As I read here, others seem to use it OK (reservations about one pulse/rev and threading duly noted) but there are bits of it that just do not want to play. OK, moving from screen to screen is cumbersome but I'm sure I could get used to it, but showstoppers at the moment are that having run a complete gcode file successfully, I can no longer jog. It seems that the feed stays on "feed per rev" but sets itself to zero. I enter the gcode instruction for "mm/min" in the MDI and while the display box legend changes, the value stays resolutely on zero whether I type into the box or enter Fxxx in the MDI. Having to restart Mach3 means that repetition work is awkward. And why won't Mach3 actually use the index pulses at all, when the diagnostic screen shows that they are arriving?

After discarding UCCNC, I short-listed Acorn (hdw and sw from one vendor - good idea!), LinuxCNC plus Mesa board (as the most recommended board to use with LCNC - but Mesa say "out of stock" ) , PlanetCNC (also single-vendor), and somewhere at the back of the pack, Mach4 but needs a motion controller and not sure which one. Acorn looked reasonable but seemed expensive; LCNC/Mesa (assuming suitable cards available) seems like a project in its own right - yes, there's plenty of help available from enthusiastic supporters but the answers usually seem to need another whole round of questions to both understand and also determine what has not been said but assumed; PlanetCNC did not seem to get much criticism, seems to have a fair bit of built-in lathe support, and was reasonably priced.

But I would like to get to play with the machine using what's there pending arrival of the new bits, and I just can't get Mach3 to play properly! One of us doesn't know the rules...

Edited By Nealeb on 18/09/2023 20:29:02

Edited By Nealeb on 18/09/2023 20:30:05

I have recently bought a Denford Orac CNC lathe. The previous owner was either in the middle of ripping out the old electronics (which was a replacement of the original Denford electronics) or installing new. In either case, it was part-complete but by adding a missing ground connection between motion control and driver boards, I had it working. The motion control board (some cheap undocumented Chinese board) had a Mach3 plugin so already having a Mach3 licence, this was my starting point. Lots of trials and tribulations finding the ports and pins data, etc, but it kind of worked.

My question, though, is how other users find Mach3 Turn, and whether I am even using the right version. I find it clunky and unreliable. I am currently running revision .066 which I believe to be the latest, but I am aware that sometimes it is necessary to update Mach3 to an earlier version to fix bugs introduced in later releases...

I find the need to switch between three different screens from initial homing and referencing to actually cutting somewhat clumsy, complicated by the fact that once a toolpath has finished, the machine refuses to see any more keyboard input and I end up restarting Mach3 to be able to do anything else. I have wired the spindle index signal to the MC board and Mach3 is registering it as I turn the spindle by hand, but I can't get Mach3 to actually use it for speed control and hence no screwcutting at the moment.

I actually have a PlanetCNC motion controller and associated software on order as Mach3 is somewhat past its sell-by date - but I know it has its users still and they can't find it as bad as I do! So what am I doing wrong?

My mother used her iron from one of those two-way light socket adaptors for years - until a shower of sparks almost set fire to the lampshade. Years of shaking about had frayed the insulation. But then, that was in the house with two fuseboxes - one for the fuses in the live side of the supply and one for the fuses in the neutral...