Mill homing and "drills bolt holes"

Why????? At most..it should take maybe 15 seconds

Learn what the Gcode is for Dwell.....

It should be noted..that each command should be on its OWN line, rather than on the same line.

Tends to work better than way in most cases. Tends to be far more gentle on your drill bits too....

Cool!!!

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

Maybe I programmed latching moves to find the index pulse, to be too slow.

i

Generally..there are two types of homing travel moves:

1. A rapid until a certain switch or location is hit then a sudden slow to home
2. A somewhat more sedate move to home where it hits a switch and stops.

But..I suspect you have your moves a bit ...slow.

Shrug...

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

My (EMC's the way I set it) homing routine is as follows:

1) Move fast to home switch 2) Stop when home switch is hit 3) Move away from home switch slowly until I get an index pulse 4) Quickly move table to zero position (so the middle of the table is under the quill).

Hey Iggy,

I can't comment on a lot of what you are doing, and I don't understand the term "latch point" as used in your text. but there is certainly some validity to coming "off" a point to make a more accurate set point. That is, your running onto a homing switch ("break" from NO to NC) at high speed, then backing off that switch slowly until it "makes" again, and using that as the home point. That is the way, for instance, that a Renishaw probe on a CMM works. It doesn't register a data point as the probe touches, as that initial contact can cause true bounce and "point bounce" inaccuracies, but does register the data point as the probe comes OFF.

I hope that the "homing switches" referred to are not the limit switches which would/should be following in close proximity and preferably on a different cam, or better yet, no cam. Limit switches to me are the "finals" and would cause an E-stop, versus the homing switches just cause a directional stop.

I would also suggest that you think carefully about your "line" # 4). I think that machine "Home" should be at (or very near) the limit of X,Y,,Z. By your then making a continued automatic (programmed in the operating system) move to some point other than the limits will bite you in the ass someday. I'd make the table centering X0, Y0 move as a separate move, either coded or in G mode. Besides, it's not quite as useful a position as you might think it is in actual use. X0, Y0, is more arbitrary, such as you wanting to do a bolt hole pattern, which will rarely be "centred" on the table, but rather picked up 2 edges or from some point on the work.

Just my (far-far-less-than-expert) opinion. Sure sounds like fun though !!!

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

That's close, but not exactly true.

The mill runs into home switch at high speed.

It comes off home switch and keeps going away from it, slowly, until the encoder on the motor hits an "index point", which is a signal sent back to the computer. That means that, at this point, the position is known precisely.

Yes, what makes me especially happy, is that I have home switches for homing, and limit switches now cause ESTOP and are only used for estop purposes.

If I set my software limits correctly and use a proper homing routine, and if servo drives and encoders work, my mill will never hit a limit switch.

Now, if something does go wrong, like a servo drive loses tachometer signal or encoder breaks, etc, and I hit a limit, the whole thing will be estopped.

I found out today that I can home all axes simultaneously, and that is what I will try to set up tonight.

it is

Well, the move is AWAY from home.

it is fun indeed.

i

You want to use G61.1 on all drilling programs, or anything else where you don't want blending of sequential moves. By default, (G64) EMC begins interpolating in the next move at the point where the deceleration starts on the current move. If you have your machine acceleration set low, this can occur over a pretty large distance. What is the MAX_ACCEL in the [TRAJ] section, and in your individual axis sections of the .ini file?

Jon

Here they are.

I have not yet started working with that, as I planned on doing this when I begin fighting with following errors. Right now I have essentially disabled following errors.

For some reason nothing displays in Halscope.

MAX_ACCELERATION = 1.5 MAX_ACCELERATION = 1 MAX_ACCELERATION = 1 MAX_ACCELERATION = 1

What's that Lassie? You say that Ignoramus9140 fell down the old rec.crafts.metalworking mine and will die if we don't mount a rescue by Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:45:23 -0500:

"The mill combined" or is that just the way you programmed it? If you have a line like: G00X2.5 Y2.5 Z-3.0 Then both the X,Y and Z axis will move at the same time. Interpolation just means that they will end up at the position at the same time. Non interpolated would allow one or the other axis to get to the new position first.

To prevent tool breakage in the above example you would separate the Z move. Thus: G00Z-3.0 G00X2.5 Y2.5

Ayup...#1

A home switch is nothing more than a physical indicator of where the table is actually At. Without one..its always guessing and hoping.

The OmniTurn CNC lathes I maintain, dont have a home switch on either axis. There are lables on the axis covers..and when you home one..you put the pointers anywhere between zero and 1..and then hit the home switch..and it counts until it hits the Home Pluse in the servo.

Which means one can home the table at ANY location..which for some jobs..works very well. For others..best run back to zero and rehome.

Ayup...a move from home to Zero....zero being a user defined location in axis travel.

One of the biggest differences between a mill and a lathe..is that the mill uses the center of the table (sometimes) as Zero and works +/- from there. Lathes nearly always use Home for zero..or a user defined Zero location different from T1 (tool 1) T2 etc etc.

Each tool has its own "home AND/OR zero" locations on a lathe..on mills..each tool has its own Zero location. And in 3 axis, rather than the normal 2 in lathes.

So why is it taking 2 minutes to home the mill?

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

Now it takes 27 seconds. I home simultaneously and a little faster.

i

MUCH better..though it might be a bit slow yet. But its now doable

What is the max Ipm feed rate on your mill?

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

Oh, 1 inch/sec^2 is VERY slow acceleration. No wonder you see rounded corners. I have all these set to 3.0, and that is limited by my 3/8" wide timing belts. If I turn it up to 5.0, it breaks belts.

HalScope takes a little while to get used to. You have to select HAL signals to the channels, select a trigger source and then enable normal trigger. You can click force trigger to see what is going on. Then you can move the gain and offset sliders to amp up the signals you need so you get some vertical change.

Jon

Yes, I have already increased it to 3.

I have not quite figured it out. I can run it, but I do not have enough room on my screen to have halscope and emc running together. Plus I have not mastered triggering.

Here's what I want: watch axis.0.f-error and axis.0.commanded position and axis.0.speed in one window, triggered ONCE when I submit a G code command G01 Y1 F55

i

Yes, a 1024 x 768 screen makes all this easier, even bigger is better. You can always drag a good screen from another computer while doing the debugging and tuning, then revert to a low-res screen later. I can't get the EMC GUI, HalScope and the calibration menu all on the screen at the same time, either. So, I overlap them all, and have to click with the mouse to foreground the window I want. With a bigger screen, I can get 3/4 of HalScope to show off to the side of the EMC GUI. (I use Axis, have you tried it yet? You just have to change one comment in the [DISPLAY] section of the .ini file.) So, when tuning, I do this thing where I change a setting in Calibration, do a jog on the Axis window and then foreground HalScope to see how it looked, then repeat. A little cumbersome, but you can actually do it pretty quick, better than one cycle every 10 seconds.

Trigger off ppmc.0.encoder.00.delta, which is raw encoder delta-counts per servo cycle. This makes a real good signal to trigger HalScope on. You have a trigger selector box in the lower right corner, and a polarity just above it. Above that on the right edge is the trigger level, you want it above zero for positive moves and below zero for negative moves. Somewhere around 10 - 30 is a good trigger point, depending on the move velocity and encoder resolution. The trigger pos slider moves where in the horizontal trace the trigger is positioned, you can select to see more time before the trigger or more time after.

Hmmm, axis.0 refers to the X axis, if you command a move on the Y, you won't see anything. Y is axis #1. So, if you want to tune Y, bring up these signals : ppmc.0.encoder.01.delta (this is also trigger channel) pid.1.error

Axis.n.f-error may not be instantaneous following error, the integrator manual doesn't say! I know pid.n.error works. You want to bump up the vertical gain slider on the pid.1.error channel to about 5m to start with, this will be .005 inch per vertical division. The vertical gain slider for the delta should be at something like 10 (10 counts/servo cycle rate = 1 vertical division). The Vertical gain and pos sliders apply to whichever channel is selected from the colored boxes just below the display window. If you move the cursor inside the display window, a field below the window shows the X and Y coordinates of the selected trace matching your X mouse position, and indicated by a dot on the trace, so you can read absolute values off the trace.

Once you get triggering working, you can leave the trigger mode in normal/normal, but you can use the force button to see what the signal levels are at the moment. Stop freezes the trace for examination and screen capture.

My Wiki page :

has some sample traces that might be useful to compare to what you get there.

Jon

Since EMC is running on top of the X11 display engine (with your choice of window manager on top of that), you should bear in mind that X11 can happily talk to two or more monitors -- if you have an empty slot for a second graphics card (probably called a "framebuffer" in the X11 documentation). Even if you do not have one -- there are graphics cards which will talk to two monitors at once, so you can gain a lot of screen space -- if you have desktop/workbench space for the second monitor. You can even drag an application window from one of the screens to the other if you so desire.

Type "Xorg -help | less" to get a scrollable display of options to Xorg -- and look for "xinerama"

====================================================================== +xinerama Enable XINERAMA extension -xinerama Disable XINERAMA extension ======================================================================

Hmm ... the pipe to less needs to have standard error joined to standard output for the above to work. And how to do it varies between shells. If you are using csh or tcsh as your shell, the syntax would be:

Xorg -help >& | less

however -- for Bourne shell, bash, zsh, ksh, and possibly some others, try this instead:

Xorg -help 2>&1 less

Anyway -- if I remember correctly, XINERAMA requires two identical monitors to work -- at least two with the same resolution frame rates and such.

You will have to find out where to add in the "+xinerama" option to Xorg on your system.

Or -- you can simply let the second monitor show up and add the "-display 1:0" (or perhaps "-display :1" to the command line which starts EMC or HalScope).

I'm sort of tempted to do this on my Sun Blade 2000 (UltraSPARC based system), since I have two identical framebuffers, and have recently found a mount for dual LCD monitors on a single base. Just a matter of affording another good monitor like the one which I am currently using. :-)

Now all I need is to figure out how to get to the DVD-burner tray with two LCD monitors in front of it. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I have a feeling that AXIS cannot do it due to use of OpenGL or some such. But this is interesting. I have a 19 incher at home that I could use temporarily. I also brought it from work (they threw it away after someone dropped it and it cracked. But it works fine).

i

The general EMC2 homing operation with encoder index sensing has 3 phases. First, it does a rapid search for the home switch. Then, it backs off and does a slower approach. When the switch makes the second time, it then has a number of options. It can back away from the switch to find the index pulse, or continue farther toward the switch. Once it has found the index pulse, it marks that location, but can set the final home position to be some offset from that position. The offset is required if you have a combined home/limit switch, as you will get an error if it stops at home, and the limit switch is actuated.

So, this search for the index pulse is where a zero coordinate is latched into the encoder counter when the index pulse is detected. This is usually done in the encoder counter hardware, so that it is on the exact encoder count where index was detected, and not delayed until the computer next samples the encoder count.

Z home probably ought to be near full up. But, there's no reason X and Y home need to be at one end. As long as the home switch will not be damaged by overtravel (such as a roller switch which is set up to just deflect and flip back after the cam passes it) having home in the center is fine. Since most machining is near the center of travel, then this may incur less thermal expansion from the home position from day to day. (Not that the usual home shop machinist worries too much about thermal expansion of his machines.) The home position is just a repeatable reference for the machine limits and to re-establish a precise offset from day to day.

Jon

I don't know about xinerama, but OpenGL and your favorite window manager definitely support multiple monitors, not that that is really called for here. But, a bigger screen may be a boon for the testing/tuning phase.

Jon