At the moment I am just going to leave all the original board intact until I have proven Mach3 and used it for a while as at present it is still easy to take a step back and have a standard machine. In time I will probably strip out the bits I need from the original under-machine drawer and build th...

Gotcha :D Sorted out my mistake and i've now got movement and direction on all axis. Problem 1) came about when I did a continuation test between drives motherboard and 16pin ribbon cable. By mistake I connected 24v to 0v ouch! No wonder I kept blowing fuses. Problem 2) was due to the X,Y, & Z fault...

I did try something similar to what you were suggesting last night. What I did was simply unplug the ribbon to the drives. I then powered up which energised the motors. I then 'shorted out' the Z step pin on the cable to 0v. Whilst this sounds crude it is exactly what the interface circuits does any...

AHH Frustration :x :x :x Rebuilt the interface board with a 'power take off' for the other pins that are not listed on David's drawing but the problem doesn't seem to be anything do do with these extra pins. After further tests, it seems that one of the fuses on the X card, and only the X card, keep...

Good idea.
I think I will have to build it onto a board, however, connecting with 16pin plug and socket, as the ribbon cable seems to be permenantly fixed to the drives motherboard.

Back to Maplins!

Well still no luck. Rebuilt the interface board and tested it with LED linked to seperate supply. I then plugged it into the drive ribbon cable and turned on the drives. The drives energised and motors locked up but when I 'pulsed' 4.5v (3x 1.5v AA cells) nothing happened. After powering down I remo...

Hi David, The Geckos are good for 7amp apparently so would offer some serious potential improvement in performance which the cast iron structure of the machine frame, and BT35 tooling, would probably cope with. Obviously maximum performance improvement would need bigger motors, which in turn might s...

Hi Matt, Thanks for your reply. Whilst I appreciate what you are saying about cutting more 2.5D than 3D, I don't really know what I will use the machine for when it is done! The fun for me is seeing if I can actually get a machine, for which I paid £200, running as good as it can (3D profiles, CAD, ...

Sorry, I thought you were playing my fairy godmother. I was fully expecting your next offer would be to collect the machine and do a complete refit for free ..."wake-up Richard, you're dreaming" Yes, you are right the machine is running and I can program it via the keypad. The immediate jump to Mach...

David I was doing the testing with 3off AA 1.5v batteries on the computer side of the circuit, and then an LED and resistor on the machine side of the circuit which was also linked to the same battery and ground. Don't worry, I didn't put it anywhere near the computer. At this stage I would just li...

...well that was a bit of a disaster! I think I might have to improve my soldering skills for version 2 as I must have had a dead short on my first attempt as the 4.5v battery I made up got rather warm and nothing worked. I guess that the 3K3 resistor on the diagram is there to limit flow of current...

Well it must be inflation at Zimbabwe type proportions as the toal for the parts came to £8.07 from Maplins :wink: Still a damned site cheaper than three new Gecko drives if it works. The green screw connectors can be wired to the breakout board and the 16pin socket will plug directly into the ribbo...

Thanks David & Admin, It looks like I can make that thing shown on the link with bits picked up from ebay, in fact I could probably buy the bits to build a 100 for a couple of quid ...but: 1) what is it? 2) How does it work? 3) can I just wire it into the ribbon cable? 4) which way round does it go?...

At long last I thought I had the opportunity to give something back to this forum ...but unfortunatley, and probably quite wisely, you cannot upload programs with .exe file extensions. :cry: If anyone wants it mailed direct, I have a simple program that will allow you to input your available change ...

Dear All, My 1990 Triac ATC machine works in all axis quickly, accuratley, and without hesitation. Now that I have come to programming it though the above points cannot be applied to me as an operator with the typing of individual lines of Gcode. There is no appeal whatsoever doing this particulaly ...

Thanks Guys. Just a couple of things to get me started though... I can borrow an old computer with the 25pin printer port but is there a wiring diagram anywhere so I can make up the cable? Where do I find the Industrial Text Editor? What does "bear in mind that the arcs are single quadrant only" mea...

My machine is working ok and accepts various G code prompts from the keyboard on the machine front i.e. X,Y,Z feed, fast traverse, toolchange (super-cool!), absolute datum etc. Firstly, as i understand that there are various versions (dialects?) of Gcode about, please advise what my machine will und...

There is a God! After scouring my contacts in machine automation (HNC, PAL etc) and pestering people that probably had better things to do, trying to source a new SD2/1 card for the Triac I ended up phoning Parker. They told me that they did a repair service for the SD2/1 at £96+vat. The bloke then ...

Would appreciate you having a look just in case.
I have set my ebay searches, one for 'Digiplan' and another for 'Denford' so I will just have to wait and see what appears.

Thanks ...Richard

only wish it was a dicky pin on the plug but I think it is one of the cards! Swapped over the X and Y cards and that reversed the problem. Checked the surface mounted fuses on the suspect card and they were ok. Tricked the machine into thinking the faulty axis had datumed and everythin came on line ...