CNC Torch Table/User's Manual
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Overview
Manual for the Torch Table.
Torch Table Trouble Shooting
For those extra hard to reach bugs
- Check stepper motors
- They should turn when powered off, so the whole table should move freely. If it doesn't fix it.
- When the motor controller is powered on, with the PC disconnected, the stepper motors should be locked in place or provide significant resistance.
- If everything checks out, the motor driving circuitry and the stepper motors are at least working correctly.
- Check the PC parallel port.
- You can do this with a multimeter and LinuxCNC. If you test one of the pins under control and its jumping around like crazy then the computer is at the least sending something with the parallel port
- There are options to change the parallel port address from the default. In the case of the IBM laptop, the parallel port was 3BCH, which is a hex value.
- Check the pinout of the cable.
- In our case we used a shielded straight pass through cable, which means each pin on either side corresponds to its matched up pin on the male/female connector.
- If it's different than what you think it should be, according to whatever motor controller you're using, you can adjust the pin out in EMC2. Look up how to do this.
- Check installed version of Linux.
- In the version we used, there was an issue where the kernel drivers for 8.4 weren't compatible with 8.10 and above. This means that it installed fine but there wasn't an option for using the special real time EMC2 kernel. The fix is to reinstall using either the live CD which will leave you with a clean Ubuntu install with the software already installed (very convenient if it works), or installing from scratch Ubuntu 8.4 and installing the package seperately from [[1]]
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