Re: Amplifier fault w/steppers..?????

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

Hi Pat

I've had a lot of experience with steppermod and crashes -- not because 
steppermod is buggy but because I constantly tested the limits of it looking 
for exactly the kinds of problems you are having now.

To me, the error you are getting and the timing that raises it suggests that 
this is a case of either to many step pulses for the size of the bin you are 
trying to put them in or to big a bin for the buffer that is supposed to hold 
it.  We had a lot of problems with this long ago.  I thought that they were 
fixed before 2.10 but I know that they were present in earlier bdi releases.  
I don't even remember exactly what the fix was or where you had to make it 
and recompile but it was something to do with buffer size in the motion stuff.

My suggestion is that you upgrade to the latest release.  You can do this 
from the full bdi download sites.  The first link is for the 2.18 and is 
hosted by Henkka.  The second is for the TNG and is hosted by Till.  These 
are BIG downloads.

http://www.yty.net/cnc/bdi.html
http://www.isw.uni-stuttgart.de/personen/t_franit/echtzeitlinux/index.html

I believe that you can simply download the rpms at www.linuxcnc.org/bdi and 
install both the 2.18 and rcslib to produce a complete new EMC.

http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/RPMS/emc-rtl3.0-2.18.i386.rpm
http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/RPMS/emc-rtl3.0-2.18.i386.rpm

Select the replace files option in kpackage once you have these someplace on 
your bdi hard drive.

One caution here is that after you have completed the upgrade you should 
start with a run and ini file from the new version and edit them for your 
machine rather than trying to bring in your old run and ini files.  Use these 
for the values but edit the variables in the new.

If you need new disks contact me off list.

Hope this helps.

Ray



On Wednesday 16 April 2003 07:30 pm, you wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been having a problem running EMC lately that I can't seem to
> crack, and I'm hoping that some kind soul on the list can help me out.
> First of all, I'm running BDI 2.10 on a 333 MHz machine with 128 Mb of
> RAM.
>
> EMC always starts up fine, but _sometimes_ when I click on "Machine On"
> (after pressing F1 to toggle off estop) I get the following error
> message:
>
>     Amplifier fault on axis 1
>
> This doesn't happen every time, but after it does the only thing that
> will make it stop is a full power-off reboot....not something you have
> to sit through too many times before you get tired of it!!!
>
> Examining the messages in the console window (from which I start emc
> using emc.run) I find the following:
>
>     minimilltaskintf.cc 962: Error on axis 0.
>     minimilltaskintf.cc 962: Error on axis 1.
>     minimilltaskintf.cc 962: Error on axis 2.
>
> The weird thing is that I'm using steppers and therefore steppermod.o
> and not the servo driver at all.  So where does an amplifier come in???
> It seems as though the state of the parallel port is related to this
> problem.
>
> Any help would be much appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Pat Ferrick