Re: EMC stepper ini file

Hi Brian. Welcome to the EMC users club.

Nope! Several have posted ini files to the emc list but they have not
been housed in any specific place. So much of it is redundant that you
would almost need to run diff to see how it was changed from machine to
machine.

Yep! EMC is "do-able" at a beginners level. I was when I started and
it's a lot easier now thanks to folk like Fred, Will, Tom, Paul, Tim, and
Jon and a host of others. The answer to the question, "Have I bitten off
more than I can chew with the EMC, really depends upon your
perseverence." It sounds like your background should make the control
and the motors the only hurdle.

The steep learning curve has been smoothed a lot in recent years. For
perspective, you might go back to some of the early posts by those of us
who use it. I think Jon said it took him three weeks of double shift and
weekends (hyperbole) before he saw anything that looked like it might run
a machine. Jon is not one given to a lot of cussin', but I'd bet if you
read lips, he mouthed a few. I know Matt has! Paul's BDI reminds me a
bit of Douglas Adam's hyperspace bypass or a chunk of 90/94 in Eastern
Montana . You can get to a usable CNC pretty quick.

Backlash is the problem with scales. There is a recent post in the emc
archive that talks about problems that one fellow (Dave Engvall) has/had
with servo tuning and lash between his motors and the glass scales.
Perhaps he will elaborate on his servo experience for us here.

I assume that you plan to feed the scales back into the EMC using a
Kulaga/Mauch dro board and smdromod. Ordinary backlash compensation is
designed to read several encoder pulses and throw them away whenever the
direction changes. This is not the case with a scale because the lash
happens between the motor and the scale rather than between the encoder
and the axis bed. If we could find a software engineer who could teach
it to feed in backlash pulses as if this setup were an open loop stepper
setup but read the scale for position it might work.

Ray

>    Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 01:34:20 -0000
>    From: "bdrmachine" <bdrmachine@...>
> Subject: EMC stepper ini file
>
> Is there a web source for examples of emc ini setup files?  I have a
> bp clone with 1070 oz-in steppers.  I'd like to understand further
> (By example) how to setup a bp clone with steppers and glass
> scales.  Is EMC do-able at a beginners level?  I have a good back
> ground in electronics, Manual machining and pc windows.  I have BDI
> load on a pc with a steep learning curve ahead.
>
>
> Thanks
> Brian