coolterm not sending all gcode

This is good news, but it’s also bad news – if the 2.2.17 driver is broken. How did you get 2.2.16? I had to hack the URL. Did you?

I will want to test this before changing the config page. I have 2 laptops that I use, an the one I’m on right now has the 2.2.17 driver in my “sources” directory, and I have no way to test what is actually loaded as it appears that the USB listing in the system profiler doesn’t show a driver unless it’s activated – which I will not be able to do for the next week due to travel.

In the mean time, happy cutting.

UPDATE: I had to run home. Here’s what’s in my system profiler under FT232R USB UART:

Product ID: 0x6001

Vendor ID: 0x0403  (Future Technology Devices International Limited)

Version: 6.00

Serial Number: A5014Y93

Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec

Manufacturer: FTDI

Location ID: 0xfa122000 / 10

Current Available (mA): 500

Current Required (mA): 90

No indication of driver revision other then “Version” that doesn’t seem to correlate to the driver rev. How did you determine your driver revision?

• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by alden.

So, I had been experiencing similar issues as above but kind of intermittent. They’ve now worsened to the point where I’m basically unable to use the tinyg. This was with coolterm on a macbook pro, but also in other settings as I detail below.

I tried rolling back the FTDI driver to 2.2.16 and it didn’t do anything for me. Also tried tgfx and windows coolterm in bootcamp, and coolterm for linux on a netbook. All of them just sort of stall out in the middle of sending the file, and it happens with about everything I send at it now (everything is generated with cambam). But it doesn’t always stall at the same place and occasionally it will actually make it through the whole file.

I was wondering, does tgfx use the xon/xoff flow control also, or something else? (i.e. like the grbl g-code senders).

EDIT: to be more specific on what happens when it fails, with linux coolterm it pops up some dialog box about serial port error or “serial port disconnected” or something like that. With the mac coolterm, it usually just freezes up (although one time I sat there and watched as the percentage of file sent kept going up while it was indicating xoff in coolterm and tinyg was doing nothing).

• This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by roberlin.

We’ve noticed this as well. It looks like interference between the noisy spindle and the computer – in particular the USB port. What type of computer are you running? Riley had a similar issue with his Panther and things work fine on one machine (Mac) and poorly on another (Dell laptop). We are still trying to work out how to isolate this. The best solution is to make the spindle less noisy. To that end we are trying some capacitors and varistors for spike clamping. Do you have separate AC circuits you can run the computer and spindle on?

hmm… ran it with the spindle on in my hands and following as close to where it “should be” as possible and it actually made it all the way through. This would seem to suggest vibration.
But I can’t seem to get it to stall by jiggling stepper motor solder joints or other electrical connections…

When I handheld the spindle I kept it within a few inches of where it should have been, but not touching anything, to try to minimize the distance difference. But it is possible my shapeoko is acting like an antenna, and the contact is necessary for that? 🙂

Anyway, I did some more testing and am leaning towards the emi as well. Like it was still stalling when I totally disconnected the tinyg from the shapeoko and moved it onto the concrete floor where it shouldn’t be getting any vibration. (was tracking progress via he graphics in tgfx).

I will get out an extension cord and try a different circuit like you suggest. And I’ll check out that link.