Gopal

I am also going through the pains of this install on x64. Keep in mind that the primary task, it appears, for the originator of the program is to support Stepoko and most of the effort is on his Mac.

I have asked for help and awaiting some sort of an answer… Oh, well!
This is what I have done so far on my own – not being any sort of an engineer, I UN-installed the tgfx_windows-x64 v.95 build 2072 and the EDGE build v.96 2404 to no avail.

I installed the latest x32 exe file posted by Mr. Riley. It was very frustrating at first as the screen was oversized, many of the control boxes hidden, review screen blank, USB-COM communication stuck, all the $ commands laughing back at me silently, unable to apply changes to axes, machine setup etc etc etc. Finally I decided to do a clean uninstall using a program called Revo. I noticed that tgfx leaves a lot of “junk” in the rgistry. I removed them all (actually Revo does it for you). Then I reinstalled the tgfx and finally the software was good to go. I used the command line to re-do my configuration (NOT the shapeoko that the forum supports).

This does not mean everything is hunkydory. TinyG has its own quirks. The only thing it does well is the Gcode parsing. The driver part is poorly “engineered” – (I have to put that in quotes ’cause I am not an engineer!). I looked up the Texas Instrument data sheet for the driver chip (TI8818) and it is rated at 2.5amp max. It has all sorts of thermal and over current protection. The “heatsink” for the chip is a strip of PCB trace – no way to know if the internal silicon is reaching self shut down due to poor heat transfer – a major cause for missing steps. I see that the current sense resistor is poorly located on the board and I have no idea the transients on the trace connecting the sense resistors – case for over current shut down. I am sure the chip is capable of driving steppers with <2amp phase current. Be careful where you set the PWM frequency as it may invalidate timing the stepper when you use microstepping. Wrong setting on the white pot (current control) can drive the steppers into some sort of resonance mode (whining motors).

All in all this is a WORK-IN-PROGRESS from Synthetos and they say so (their escape clause)!!! Early adopters like us are trying to use both the TinyG and tgFX at our own risk. BOTH ARE DEFINITELY NOT PRODUCTION MATERIAL….sad to say. I am a retired physicist trying to pick up a hobby that is more tangible than my past career; but it looks like this path is not as enjoyable as I had expected…. too many ifs and buts that I was hoping to avoid.
Gopal

Hi Riley,
The x64 is useless and very buggy. The x84 is ok but can be launced only randomly on my Toshiba Laptop running win7 Ultimate. TinyG DOES NOT echo anyting when connected. Jog using arrows and + /= only work sometimes.

tgFX always come up with metric and if one forgets to set the units to inches everytime tgFX is started there job is lost. G20/21 does not seem to help(?) Many missing steps and sometimes misses line of gcode!

Velocity or FR display doesn’t always follow gcode.
When Motor1 & 2 are run together, the Velocity value is some different number

There can be a screen size configuration.
Any info from Synthetos ALWAYS show OSX screen and setup (https://github.com/synthetos/tgFX, for example).

Would be nice to have a scolling gcode to show which line is being used.

I am using TinyG v8 and the latest binary for tgFX.

Thanks for all the help!

Gopal

The arrow has to be at the bottom edge of the top selection boxes to be active.