On Thursday 24 September 2009, Sven Wesley wrote:
>Yes, maybe. What should I look for?
>
The voltage levels your parport is capable of outputting, and whether there 
may be extra noises on the signals.  The scope will need to be dc coupled of 
course, and have good bandwidth.  The 100mhz dual trace that most techs carry 
is about right for this sort of stuff.

Your parport should be capable of outputting a logic zero that is well below 
.2 volts, which gives about a .4 or .5 volt margin for noise.  Conversely, 
the logic 1's should be 2.9 volts or better ttto have that same half a volt 
for noise margin, and here, generally speaking, the pullup ability is rather 
puny, so noise on the line becomes more important.  There is a voltage range 
from about .6 volts to around 2.4 volts where the chip makers will not say 
what the output will be, so the driving voltages must be more  widely 
separated in order to be running at guaranteed valid signaling voltages.

Sure, one can measure this with a multimeter, but it doesn't show you the 
noise that screws things up.  The scope will.  And some parport driver chips 
are known to have very low driving abilities.  The cure there is to use an 
aftermarket card, which will generally have much stronger drivers on it.

'star' grounding schemes are also good practice.  Just tying all the grounds 
together all over the place will often cause ground loops, which can pick up 
large amounts of noise & muck with things in strange ways.  The shield 
coverings of my motor cabling are grounded only at the driver terminal ends, 
and not to the machine, which has its own frame ground via the power cord and 
the variable speed spindle controller.  I can even do EDM with an 80 volt, 6 
amp capable supply running at 3 amps, so noisy my 75 year old ears object, 
but none of that noise gets into the control circuits badly enough to effect 
the machine.

>2009/9/24 Gene Heskett <[email protected]>
>
>> On Wednesday 23 September 2009, Sven Wesley wrote:
>> >I'm still loosing on Z by the way, I'm starting to suspect a faulty
>>
>> driver.
>>
>> Do you perchance have access to an oscilloscope?
>
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