Clunky Curves

[matt_r]

Greetings,
I have been noticing lately that when cutting curves, that the movement of my shopbot becomes 'clunky'. Meaning, they are not very smooth. Now, before this turns into a discussion on 'a curve is nothing more that a bunch of line segments' - I know that. But it almost seems like its droping steps or something. I have set my resolution to something like .0001, and my x&y speeds on my prt are usually around 1.5 to 1.7 in/sec. It only seems to do this on the 'machine along a vector' toolpaths, and the outline tool paths. It seems to move fluidly on lettering and area clear. The problem seems to have started back at Christmas, when a program would start, and then slow to a crawl. Seemed to fix the 'crawl' thing by updating my control box software, but the clunky curves still remain.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

[DavePatterson (Unregistered Guest)]

check your ramping values...this happened to me while trying to smooth out the entry and exit speeds.

[jsfrost]

My last clunky curve adventure was loose set screws on the Y motor. Try manually shaking the X and Y with the control box running and the SB in fixed position. There should be firm resistance and no slipping. If something moves, look for the reason.

Jim

[propellers]

Matt, I cut mostley 2.5D. I had this happen also. In my program I have the carriage park clear of my parts, remove and reload the parts. I wrote into the program a homing file to be sure the machine starts at the same place each time since the part is is on a jig.

Come to find out the homing program take out the SC command, so each line is read and executed then reads the next line executes for the length of the file. This caused the jerking action. In my program I reinserted the SC command and all runs smooth.

[btk]

Matt,

I was having some clunky motion on my machine.
I was able to isolate the problem by doing the following, however maybe you want to contact Shopbot as they could walk you through also.

I Disconnected X1 [Make sure to first power down the Shopbot Controller] and then reran the path with only X2.
I then plugged back in X1 and disconnected X2.
I was able to determine that the problem was with my X2 Controller.

You can test the Y controller by swithcing with one X and reconfiguring (search forum for how to do ).

[btk]

I mentioned in my post above
However:

Make sure to power off your controller before disconnecting/reconnecting any wires.