Cable lenght is worth a shot. I believe the spec is 25ft. I've run longer on home made cables with no problems back in the day on line printers FWIW I was thinking board too
Here is a good read about using parallel cards and which ones to use http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index. ... ic=11300.0 Mark and Trish
New parallel card is at home. I'll try it when I get home tonight and hopefully that will solve my problem. If not, I'll have to get the driver board replaced.
Put in a pci card with a moschip mcs9865. Same result. Z moves fine but x and y only move one direction. Checking the voltages on the driver board for x and y direction, they both go from 0v to 2.85v when changing direction. So it must be a bum driver board. Mark and Trish, who do I need to contact to attempt to either get this board repaired or replaced? Thanks for helping me narrow the problem down. Hopefully I'll be in business soon. Nathan
Nate, Sorry to hear you had to go through all this trouble. Please mail us the board and we will get you up and running Trish will PM you our address and details Thank you for patience, and be assured we will do what it takes to get get you up and cutting very soon! Mark and Trish
Hey guyz. We just want to let everyone that we received Nathan's board yesterday and tested it. We can only get it to jog one way as well. We are going to replace his board with a new one and we will continue to research the reason why this would happen. We'll let you know what we find out for future reference in case this happens again. Thank you everyone for all of the help and ideas you offered to Nathan while he has been trying to get his Phlatprinter up and running. Mark and Trish
Finally got a chance to try out the replacement board. Success!! Finally up and running. Now to work out some of my sketchup files. Found out the hard way need to make more tabs. Thanks to everyone who helped, especially Mark and Trish and their awesome service.
Awesome Nate. I can't remember who said it (I'm thinking maybe Dorsal on the Crashcast), but as far as the tabs go, you need less when they are for cuts mainly in the X direction than you do in the Y direction. Tim
Nate, just hooked up my new EasyCNC board that came with my Phlatty 3 this past weekend. Same exact problem as yours and I've only just found your thread. I'm thinking theres a bad batch of chips or boards in circulation. I've probably spent 3-4 hours trying everything under the sun. Different steppers, rewiring, board voltages. THEN I find your thread! Hopefully mine will be a simple swap out. Chris.
I wonder if Mark found out what the problem was with the board. Was it systemic or just a fluke, one of a kind? Especially in light of Chris' experience.
I tried running it with the same config as my MK2, straight parallel from the controller machine to the board. Hooked up my MK2 steppers and still got the same results. This morning I packed it up and sent it back to the PB LLC HQ and spoke to Mark. He's making arrangements to swap the board out. The only thing I could have done (but didn't) is to grab the PLCC chip puller and swap chips from my MK2 board to the board that came with the Pp3. I thought that might mess with any potential warranty issues and instead am just going to wait it out until a replacement board arrives. It is a weird situation. Mark didn't seem to have an idea what the problem was when I spoke to him today.
I never heard if Mark found the problem, but he replaced it right away. Hopefully yours will be the same.
Hey guys I am sending that one back to Easy-CNC so that they can see what the problem was. It helps us all in the long run for them to see the boards being used in real world applications so that they can troubleshoot and they can address what went wrong. When I hear something from Hector I will let you know. In the meantime TT your board is on its way today We tried to get overnight shipping because we know you are heading out of the country soon, but with Christmas here they have taken that option down from their website. Thanks Mark and Trish