Laptops and Mach3

[robs6]

Hi, Phil -

Was hoping you could help me with getting my Latitude D600 laptop (Centrino 1.8Ghz, 1GB memory) set up to get a clean bill of health from the Mach 3 drivertest.exe. I followed the instructions given in your Wiki page on the subject, but am still getting a narrow spike in the pulse variation display graph (occuring about once a second) , though the rating is shown as "Excellent" and the pulse timing seems pretty stable over all. What I have done is the following:

* Disable Intel SpeedStep in the BIOS
* Change the Computer device driver to Standard Computer in the Device Manager
* Set power options to "Always On" in the Control Panel
* Installed RMClock and configured it to start at boot-up time and run whenever the CPU is idle
* Disabled non-essential services as recommended by TweakHound (in fact, tried stopping all running services that were stoppable)

Though RMClock does seem to work - the task manager shows System Idle at 0% CPU and RMClock as the main user of CPU, I am still seeing the spike. I've also tried killing all extraneous processes from the task manager, to no avail.

Any ideas? Apart from this single narrow spike, the display waveform appears to be pretty good. The RMClock does not appear to be doing any good -- if I disable it, I don't really see any change in behavior.

Many thanks-
Rob

[PMinMO]

I suspect what you describe can't be fixed. Some laptops BIOS don't do a good job handling a certain interrupt (SMI) that isn't maskable that happens periodically. If your laptop uses a Intel 82845 845 (Brookdale) chipset.....

[robs6]

Thanks for your reply. The D600 has an Intel 855PM chipset. I gather from your cnczone post:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53254

that you were able to get your C610, which is supposed to be similar to the D600, to work. From what I gather, yours has the 830M chipset, so maybe that makes the difference. I gather the graph has to be almost absolutely flat (is that true?), so perhaps I am out of luck here.

Maybe I should try a SmoothStepper, and not have to worry about what machine I'm running on. It seems crazy that we are still dependent on parallel ports in 2010! I've seen so many posts describing problems with SmoothStepper, however, that perhaps it would be safer just to give up on my laptop. Do you think SmoothStepper is a safe solution? I'll be driving a G540, which is set up for a PP interface.

Thanks again - R

[PMinMO]

I'd opt for a $25 used desktop if you have room.

[LevonTecH18]

It's better to used a USB CONVERTER For interface

[PMinMO]

A simple usb to parallel converter doesn't work with cnc software/

[LevonTecH18]

It can be converted Using A Full Speed USB2.0 capable, PIC18 microcontroller with 32 Kbytes of Enhanced FLASH program memory, 2 Kbytes of RAM (1 Kbyte dual port), 256 bytes of data EEPROM and a complete selection of analog and digital peripherals .

[PMinMO]

Sure if it include the motion control algorithms and a g-code intrepreter, but then you wan't be running mach3, cncpro, emc, turbocnc or any of the mainstream cnc control programs. The problem with USB is latency, you have to have precise timing for step/dir multiple axis motion control. So to overcome the latency issue you have to do the motion planning, g-code intrepretation and motion control software outside the PC. If not running one of the above motion controllers is ok, then:
http://www.edingcnc.com/index.php?pagina=61_software
http://www.planet-cnc.com/

If you want to run mach3 on usb then smooth-stepper: http://www.warp9td.com/index.php?option ... e&Itemid=1

[LevonTecH18]

any Good USB CNC with pCB and schematics " OPEN |source" i hope pminmo.com have CNC USB INTERFACE