On Wednesday 02 September 2009, Rondal Nannie wrote: >Gene I ran a test and it is running at 380.4MHz. (The Compaq 5185 only > supports up to 348MB of Ram) It seems slow. It wanted to update EMC with > 406 updates and now that is updated. It probably needs a gravity check > off the side of the table...? Thanks for the help Ron > That is going to run emc ok, but is also, if using steppers, going to limit the speeds they can be run at. The main thread needs to run at its set repeat rate, which on my machine is about 32 microseconds, but yours will be pretty well tapped out, with nothing left to run the gui, in (and I'm guessing) 100 microseconds, maybe even longer.
If you can scout the goodwill shops and locate an old HP with a 1ghz (or faster) athlon in it, that would help. A lot. 384 megs is ok or has been for me. But this will work to get your feet wet with. To see where the limit is, start with a base thread of 150000, which would be 150 microseconds, and see how the mouse moves and how responsive the keyboard is. If that seems to lock the machine up, it can't even go that fast. If it feels normal, stop emc and reduce the base thread by 10% and retry running it. When you hit the point of severe lag, add 25% so the machine feels alive again, and report back here what it is now set to. From that we can calculate how fast it can run the motors smoothly. Part of the problem is that when the machine can issue a step pulse every 200 passes through the base thread loop, then from 200 to 199 for a speed up of the motor isn't a stretch for the motor to follow. But if it needs to go from a step every other time through this base thread loop, to a step for every pass, then the motor cannot double its speed in that 1/1000th of a second and will usually stall. That is a simplified explanation to be sure, but it serves to demonstrate the problem. >--- On Tue, 9/1/09, Gene Heskett <gene.hesk...@gmail.com> wrote: [...] -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> The Dilithium Cyrstals need to be rotated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
