Hi All--
So I have a Taig mill operated by Mach3, including an Ethernet SmoothStepper & Gecko G540 as part of the setup. I've gotten the system to be very reliable, and mostly everything works totally fine without glitches or malfunctions.
However, something really weird happens occasionally; it happened again just now, and it went more or less like this:
I had my program loaded and my piece of material stock clamped down ready to cut. And I was jogging the mill around, in the process of setting up the origin of my coordinate system just before clicking "Run".
So I was doing things like: Shift + Numeric Keypad Keys to jog X, Y, and Z at 100% of full speed; Numeric Keypad Keys without Shift to jog at the reduced speed (which I have set up at 10%); Control + Numeric Keypad Keys to jog in individual steps (which I have set up to be about 0.001" per step). Normally this all works fine and totally as expected.
But then sometimes it happens, as just happened again: suddenly the machine just takes off jogging in some direction at the reduced speed, even while I'm not pressing any of the Numeric Keypad / Jog keys. Usually when I see this start to happen, I press the emergency stop, and then recover from that. Today was more annoying, since the cutter was just above my stock surface, and the machine decided to head straight down, burying the endmill into aluminum.
I'm not sure if this is some weird malfunction, or some feature that I'm activating by mistakenly pressing some certain combination of keys of which I'm not aware. I've read about there being a continuous jogging mode that you can activate by, for example, first pressing shift, then holding down a jog key and then releasing shift, but trying that doesn't replicate the annoying behavior. I've not been able to discern clearly what's going on by reading the manual, either; there are some aspects of jogging that are still confusing to me at this point.
Anyway, any thoughts or insights or direction here?
Thanks very much--
--dave
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