Hi Craig On Tuesday 04 April 2006 05:20, Craigg Gadd wrote:
Thanks for the help. The motherboard is an Intel N440BX, it does have an onboard video card which I think is a Cirrus 4680? The processor is 600Mhz P3 and I have 256Mb of ram
The 440BX chipset is probably the best one you could ever want for realtime control, and it is likely that the video has a separate 2Meg of static RAM.. Check the BIOS for a Legacy USB option and disable it along with any power management "features".
I increased the period to .00005 and was able to run the default generic.ini file, so I was quite pleased with the progress. When I set the period back to .000022 I froze again so that appears to be the problem.
With a similar system (Celeron 433MHz, 440BX chipset), I have run freqmod at 20uSec and quickstep down to 5uSec - This was done purely for a "what if" exercise and is not recommended as jitter severely affects the stability of the stepper pulse train.
One thing I thought was interesting is that I had installed a vital systems servo card (the 4-Axis version) and using the vital.ini, I was able to run with the period set to .000022 without any problems. I guess this has something to do with the way the card is managing certain processes that would normally be handled by the motherboard?
If you are using a Vital (or any other servo interface card), the period *should* be ignored by the driver. I will look at the relevant sections of the code and see if there is a problem there..
Anyway,I'm off to hook up some motors to see if I can make something move. I'll report back.
With the Vital card, I would suggest setting PERIOD to 0.00005 or 0.0001 and ensure the servo and trajectory cycle times are a multiple of the base period. Regards, Paul.