Re: Re: Help with EMC.ini for camtronics 5 amp controllers

Ben

>    From: "bgroover1" <bgroover@...>
>
> > My guess is you may have a corrupt file or two, this happened to me
> > when I downloaded the BDI disk. Maybe Ray has some thoughts on this>
>
> I am using the emc.ini file and steppermod with the minimill setup.  
> Running from the emc.run(?) icon on the desktop.

Hey it doesn't take much of a lead in for me to run my fingers. Bill
suggested that it might be a first edition problem but that won't be the
case if you downloaded in the last month. I also do not think that the
sis 530? or similar motherboard chipset will be a problem. But the sis
display drivers are a pita. (I've got both 5xx and 6xx here)

First thing I'd do is run the checksum on the download and compare with
the value that Henkka has on his download page. If they are the same
then you can be sure that you got a good copy.

Tim mentioned step rate. That's the second thing I'd do. Use really low
values for both max_velocity and for the number of pulses per unit
distance. A 133 is near the lower edge of the pulse per second ability of
the EMC's binning process. The real time stuff will attempt to spit out
pulses at the rate that you demand using both freqmod and steppermod, but
it starves everything else and itself if it can't keep up. PC death is the
certain result of this. That death when using steppermod is usually
during the start of steppermod. Using freqmod, you will see the gui and
kde response rate sink into the mud followed by the rt stuff.

Disclaimer - - These deaths should NOT be attributed to some kind of
weakness in Linux. You are not running a Linus approved kernel and you
are not running that kernel or associated hardware using generally
accepted drivers or modules. In this list's past, devotees of other OS
religious persuasions have leaped onto these reports of PC deaths as proof
of something. They ain't proof of nothing except the boundaries of EMC
as tuned.

Paul suggested mini.run. I'm not sure that the rates in there will be
effective on a 133. I underclocked my p2, got it down to a 150, and
started up with the emc_mini icon. It showed me the tkemc gui but died
with a reboot when I tried to home the first axis. It works fine at 400
with backplot, IO_Show, and file editing all going during a run of
cds.ngc. You might edit mini.ini and cut the input_scale in half to
something around 500 or set max_velocity to 0.67 and see what that does to
the durability of a run.

You can also get a bit closer to seeing where the failures are coming from
if you set the debug in your ini file to 0x7FFFFFFF and then start your
emc run from a terminal rather than from the icon. Click on the little tv
screen on the bottom panel to raise a virtual terminal and type in two
commands, 1 - "cd /usr/local/emc <enter>," 2 - "./emc.run <enter> or
mini.run <enter>". The first response you'll likely see is "file not
found." Ignore that if other stuff follows. If other stuff does not
follow, check to see that you are in the emc dorectory. Now you can see a
lot of messages in the terminal window as the emc starts up. (sorry if I'm
pedantic here)

There are those who insist that lockup and reboot like you have
experienced on a conventional Linux file system (ex2fs) can cause serious
damage. I haven't found it to be much of a problem. With my testing, I
trashed RTLinux more than once a day for two years and have only seen one
time when it would not come back on it's own. If this worries you, you
can reinstall the BDI. Copy your ini file to a floppy and reinstall it as
well.

Configurability can be a curse until you get some practice with it -- more
so if you're newly emerged from a click-n-run background.

HTH

RayH

BTW I took a great class in teaching from an engineering prof from
Morgantown.