Mach3 Tutorial

Setting up a basic three axis milling machine.

Based on Mach3 2.0

Purpose.
The purpose of this tutorial is to help and to guide the user to, step by step, set up and tune the
Mach3 CNC controller application for use on a basic 3 axis milling machine. We will go thru
the steps of setting up the emergency stop, the charge pump circuit the main axis motors, the
spindle and coolant as well as the home switches and the software based over-travel limits.
The tutorial is based on the Mach3 v2.0 series and is meant to be used as complement to the
existing Using Mach 3 Mill manual.

Let’s get started.

When first installing the software it’s vital to reboot the computer as the installer prompts. If
you don’t do this the software will not work and you will have to manually remove the Mach3
driver from the system. After installing the software and rebooting the computer you should
have four icons on your desktop. These icons all launches Mach3 but it also loads a different
set of screens depending on what kind of machine it is we are running. Since this tutorial is
aimed at getting a milling machine up and running we’ll start the software with the one
labelled Mach3Mill. When the software is started you may be presented with the following
dialog but if not don’t worry.

Figure 1: Hardware plugin.

Since we are going to use the computers printer port as the electrical interface between the
computer and our machine we make sure that the Normal Printer Port Operation mode is
selected and since we don’t want to tell Mach3 this information each time we start the
software we put a checkmark in the box next to Don’t mask me this again and then click OK.

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Metric or imperial.
The next thing we need to do is to select the native units of choice. To do this we go to the
Config menu and click Select Native Units and select either inches or mm and click OK. Since
I’m a metric guy I choose mm.

Figure 2: Default Units

Please note that, as the message says before you get to the windows in figure 2, this selection
is not for switching the actual displayed coordinates between inches and mm nor is it meant to
switch between running part programs written in inches or mm. It is ONLY for setup and
tuning of the motors.

The hardware interface and connections.

Now we need to do is tell Mach3 how many parallel ports and at which addresses they are
located. If the port is onboard your computers motherboard the standard address is 0x378. But
other addresses are sometimes used as well. We tell Mach3 this information by selecting
Ports and Pins under the Config Menu.

Figure 3: Engine Configuration, Ports & Pins

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First check that the address of Port#1 corresponds to the actual address of your printer port
and that it is enabled. 0x378 is the address most onboard parallel ports use. Since we won’t be
using a second port here we make sure that Port#2 is disabled. (No checkmark in the Port
Enabled box under Port#2).

Next thing to do is to select our Kernel speed. This is the frequency at which the Mach3 driver
operates and is also the maximum frequency the software will output to your motor drives.
We will use 25000Hz here. Also make sure that none of the options on the right side is
enabled and then click Apply.

Next in line is the Motor Outputs tab. This is where we tell Mach3 how many motors we want
to control and to which pins in our printer port the each motor driver is connected. In this case
it’s three axis, X, Y and Z so we enable those three by making sure that there is a green
checkmark in the first column of those axis.

The second column sets the pin to which the step input on our motor drive is connected. In
this case the X axis drive step input is connected to pin 2, Y to pin 4 and Z to pin 6. The third
column is just like the second but for the drives direction inputs, wired to 3, 5 and 7 on this
machine. The actual pin out of your machine may be different. If you have wired it yourself
you probably know the pin out and if you bought the machine and/or driver box please
consult the documentation for that particular machine or check with the hardware
manufacturer.

The setting of the forth and fifth column depends on how the drives are built and how we
have them wired. The most common drives uses optically isolated inputs and are usually
supplied with a constant +5V DC from the PC. The drives step and direction inputs are then
wired to the computers parallel port which internally switches the pin to ground making the
current flow thru the LED in the drives opto isolator which in turn makes the drive move the
motor one step. This makes our step-line active low – that is it’s ‘on’ when the output is low.
Makes any sense?

Figure 4: Engine Configuration, Motor Outputs tab.

OK, that was the physical connection for the motors. Next thing to take care of would be to
set how many steps per unit we have and then go on to actually tune the motors. But before
we do that we need to tell the system about one more important thing.
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The Emergency Stop button.
Any decent machine tool should have an Emergency Stop button that, in the safest possible
way, halts all machine movement and prevents damage to the operator in the first place and/or
the machine – so will this one. This tutorial will not go into the actual hardware design of a
proper E-stop system but will focus on getting Mach3 to understand that the big red button
has been pushed. The various input signals to Mach3 are setup on the Input Signals tab under
Ports and Pins in the Config menu:

Figure 5: Engine Configuration, Input Signals tab.

About halfway down the list we should be able to find the EStop signal, make sure it is
enabled. In this case the hardware is wired in such way that the input is brought high when the
switch is pushed so the Active Low setting should not be active. In case you don’t have an E-
Stop switch you will probably have to enable the Active Low option to be able to take the
software out of E-stop mode but more on that later. As the E-Stop is the only input we’ll use
for now we make sure that none of the other inputs are enabled. Click OK to save the settings
and close the dialog.

Now lets se if we can get the system out of E-Stop mode. Make sure your hardware E-stop
button is not pressed then, on the main screen click the big red button labelled Reset.
Hopefully the blinking frame around the button will stop blinking and turn in to a nice solid
green. If it doesn’t turn green go back to the dialog in figure 5 and reverse the Active Low
setting for the E-stop input as described above and try again.

With the E-stop input out of the way and working we’ll move on.

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Motor Tuning:

Finally we’ll get to actually spin some motors. The first thing in the tuning process is to
calculate how many steps per unit of travel we have. This depends on a few things:
In case of a step motor:
• The amount of steps per revolution, most commonly 200.
• The step resolution of the motor drive, full step, half step, 5, 10, 100 micro steps etc.

In case of a servo motor.

• The amount of quadrature counts produced by the encoder on the motor
• The ‘encoder mode’ of the motor drive. 1, 2 or 4 encoder counts.

In both the above cases:

• The reduction ratio between the motor shaft and lead screw.
• And finally, the thread pitch of the screw. (How far the table moves with each rotation
of the screw).

It should be noted that other actuating systems could be used like belts, rack & pinions etc but
here we will use a lead or ball screw as the basis for our calculation. We will do one metric
and one imperial example.

The metric one:

Let’s assume we have a standard step motor with 200 steps per rev. This motor is driven by a
driver set to 5 micro steps per full step. A Gecko G210 from Geckodrive for example. The
motor is directly coupled to the lead screw which has a pitch of 5mm per revolution. That
means the axis will move 5mm for each revolution of the screw.

So we’ll take the motors 200 steps multiply that by the drives 5 micro step. (200 X 5 = 1000)
The drive needs 1000 pulses (or steps) to turn the screw one revolution thus making the axis
move 5mm. So now we take those 1000 steps and divide by the pitch of the screw, which is 5.
(1000 / 5 = 200). In other words we need 200 steps to move one unit or mm.

The imperial one:

Let’s assume a DC-servo with a 500 line encoder and a drive that uses all four quadrature
counts of the encoder effectively making it a 2000 counts per rev motor/encoder combo. Let’s
also assume we have 3:1 belt reduction driving our screw which has a 5TPI pitch.

The drive needs 2000 pulses, or steps, to turn the motor one revolution. But since we have the
3 to 1 belt reduction between the motor and the screw we need to multiply the 2000 by 3 to
make the screw turn one revolution.

6000 steps will make the screw turn one revolution, making the axis move 1/5 of an inch. To
make the axis move one inch we need the screw to make five revolutions so 6000 X 5 =
30.000 steps per unit or inch.

In reality a steps per unit value as high as 30.000 will greatly reduce the speed at which the
machine can move.

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So now we have determined how many steps the computer needs to send out to the drives in
order to move the machine one of our selected units, be it inch or mm. Let’s tell Mach3 what
we’ve come up with. In the Config menu, we select Motor Tuning and the following dialog
should present itself:

Figure 6: Motor Tuning and Setup.

The first thing to do is to enter the steps per unit we found in our calculation. We do this in
the lower left corner. We’ll use the metric calculations above as base for this setup so 200
steps per unit it is. Now comes the fun part. By dragging the sliders to the right and below
we’ll adjust the speed and the acceleration of the motor. This can of course be calculated
based on motor torque, machine inertia, mass etc but is mostly done on a trial and error basis.

Start by moving the velocity slider up a bit and then press the up or down arrow key on the
keyboard. The motor should now spin, if not make sure that the system is enabled and not in
E-stop mode.

By adjusting the Velocity and Accel sliders try to find a speed and acceleration that feels
comfortable and where the motor run smoothly without any tendency to jerk, halt, or loose
steps. Then, and this is important, click Save Axis Settings. Now click the Y Axis button and
repeat the process for that axis and then do the same for the Z axis. Don’t forget to press Save
Axis Settings before switching axis. If you don’t your setting will be lost.

Please note: It’s in perfect order to have a different step per unit setting as well as Velocity
and Accel values for each axis. Mach3 will keep them I perfect sync either way. You may
even have fractional steps per unit set for one or more axis, for example 201.3 if that is what
you need.

If you can’t seem to get the motors to run smoothly there are a few things to check, first the
easy one: Some motor drives need to have a longer step pulse and this can be set by changing
the Step Pulse setting. See the manual for your particular drive.

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The other thing to check is the voltage at parallel port pins. Most drives inputs are optically
isolated and designed to accept a 5V input. Some of the newer PC motherboards, especially
laptops, only outputs about 3.3V and this can be problem for some drives. To address this, the
easiest way is to either fit a PCI LPT-port card in the PC or to get one of the various breakout
boards available that supports boosting the voltage to 5V.

OK, to put the tuning to the test lets go to the MDI screen and make the machine do some
moves. Click the MDI button or press ALT-2 and then click the MDI input or hit enter to
enable it for input. Now type something like G0 X10 Y10 Z10 and press enter. The machine
should move all three axis from its current position to X10 Y10 Z10. The actual values used
for this test depends of the size of your machine but you’ll get the idea. Try a couple of
different moves back and forth to make sure the motor tuning is OK. If one or more axis stalls
or looses steps the tuning needs to tweaked a bit more.

Figure 7: The MDI-screen.

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Making sure the machine and DRO’s moves in harmony.
On a standard three axis milling machine the X axis moves from left to right, the Y axis
moves towards and away from you and the Z moves up and down. In the following section all
movement is considered to be of the actual tool – that is the tool moves to the right even
though it’s actually the table that moves to the left.

Go back to the Program Run screen by pressing the Program Run button or hitting ALT-1.
Make sure the LED around the Jog ON/OFF button is green, if not press that button to enable
the machine to be jogged. (The button is located in the lower middle section of the screen).

Now hit the TAB-key on the keyboard to bring out the Jog-control screen. It should come out
from the right side of your screen. If you can’t see all the controls just grab the grey line and
drag it out as far as you wish. Now we need to tell Mach3 at what speed we want it to jog and
we do that by entering a jog rate in the DRO labelled Slow Jog Rate on the jog control screen.
Let’s start slow with something like 10%. Click the DRO, type in the value of your choice and
hit enter.

Figure 8: The Program Run screen, with jog-panel fly-out.

Now press the right arrow key on the keyboard. If all is well the X-axis DRO should count up
and the tool on the machine should move in the positive direction (to the right) (table moves
from right to left). If the DRO counts up but the tool moves in negative direction we need to
reverse the motor direction. We do this by reversing the Dir Low Active setting in Ports and
Pins, Motor Outputs. If the tool moves to the right but the DRO counts down we have to
change the hotkey for the axis jog. This is done by selecting System Hotkeys in the Config
Menu. When the X-axis is OK repeat the steps for the Y and Z axis.

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The Y axis DRO should count up and tool should move away from you (table moving
towards you when standing in front of the machine) when pressing the up arrow key.

The Z axis is jogged with PageUp and PageDown buttons. The DRO should count up and the
tool should move up when pressing the PageUp button.

So, that was the most fundamental parts of setting up the Mach3 CNC control application. In
the following sections we will go thru how to set up the charge pump, spindle, coolant, home
switches and the software over travel limit.

The charge pump function.

When booting up the computer the output pins of the parallel port may be in an unknown
state. If for example we have our spindle motor wired thru a relay that is activated when
there’s 5V present on pin 8 of the port the spindle may start at any time while Mach3 is not in
control and this is a very dangerous condition. To prevent this we can use the charge pump
function in Mach3 along with a bit of hardware. We will not discuss building the hardware
part here but schematics are available from ArtSofts web site. (www.machsupport.com)

To setup the charge pump function in Mach3 we, once again, open the Ports and Pins in the
Config menu and then select the Output Signals tab.

Figure 9: The Output Signals.

About halfway down there’s a signal called Charge Pump. Put a 1 in the Port # and the Pin #
to which the circuit is connected, in this example pin #1. Then make sure the function is
enabled (a green checkmark in the Enabled column). Check that no other output signals are
enabled. Now, when ever Mach3 is running AND is not in E-stop mode there will be 12.5kHz
square wave on pin 1 of the parallel port. If you want the charge pump to run all the time
Mach3 is running, even in E-stop mode go to the Config Menu and select General Config and
enable the Charge Pump on in E-stop option.

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Spindle outputs.

Now that we have a way to prevent the spindle from starting when Mach3 is not in control
we’ll go on and setup a relay to start and stop the spindle from within Mach3. As before, we
will not discuss the actual hardware interface but it is assumed it is wired thru the charge
pump circuit and is activated by a logic low level on the pin of the port. There’s also a lot of
different ways that Mach3 can control the spindle, the simplest being plain ON/OFF control
and that’s what we are going to do here.

You may have noticed the spindle as one of the axis in the Motor Outputs tab under Ports and
pins when we set up the X, Y and Z axis. Those settings, however, is when we want Mach3 to
control the speed of the spindle by using either PWM or step and direction output and that’s
not what we are doing here. We are aiming for a simple ON/OFF control.

So the first thing to do is to enable an output. Let’s go to Ports and Pins and select the Output
Signals. In this case we are going to use Output #1 as our spindle relay output and we are
mapping that output to pin 16 of the parallel port by simply putting 1 in the Port# and 16 in
the Pin# number column and enabling the output. (Green checkmark in the Enabled column).
Then, finally, check the active low setting, hit apply and go to the Spindle Setup tab.

Figure 10: The Spindle Setup dialog.

In the top left corner, uncheck the Disable Spindle Relays and then enter a 1 in both the
Clockwise and CCW boxes. Remember that we mapped Output #1 to pin 16 where we have
our relay connected. This tells Mach3 that whenever we want to run the spindle, clockwise or
counter clockwise it activates Output #1. It is assumed in this tutorial that the actual reversing
of the spindle, if at all possible, is done either mechanically or electrically on the machine
itself and is not controlled by Mach3. You could of course enable a second output and use that
to run the spindle in the counter clockwise direction if you want.

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If you have a high speed spindle or one that for other reasons takes time to come up to speed
when turned on or down in speed when it’s turned off this can be set under General
Parameters. Enter the time it takes for the spindle to reach the maximum speed. This will
prevent Mach3 to start running a program until the spindle is up to speed. Click OK to save
the settings.

Now go to the Diagnostics Screen in Mach3 and make sure that the control is out of E-Stop
mode then click the Spindle Toggle button. If Mach3 is setup correctly you should see the red
led next to Output #1 flashing and if your hardware is correct the spindle should start.
Pressing the button again will make the spindle stop. Yeah, we have spindle control !

Coolant.
The control of the coolant is done in the same way as the spindle so we’ll only go thru this
briefly. Again, the hardware is assumed to be connected thru the charge pump and to be
activated by a logic low level on the port pin. We will only use flood coolant and it will be
controlled by Output #2 thru pin 17 on the parallel port.

First enable Output #2, set the Port# to 1 and the pin# to 17, the output should be active low.
Then go the Spindle Setup tab again en make sure the Disable Coolant Relays is not checked
and set the outputs for both Mist and Flood to #2.

Check your setting by pressing the Flood Toggle button on the Diagnostics screen. The led
next to Output #2 should start to flash and the relay should activate.

Home switches.
As you probably have noticed Mach3 is very flexible in its use of inputs and outputs. It is
possible to combine home and limit switches in many different ways but in this section of the
tutorial we will go thru how to set up one home switch for each axis, wired in series. As usual
we will not discuss the hardware and actual interface but it is assumed that the home switches
are normally closed, wired in series between ground and pin 10 on the parallel port.

To set up the home switches we need to enable the home inputs. In the Config menu select
Ports and Pins and go to the Input Signals tab. Enable the inputs X Home, Y Home and Z
Home and set the port # to 1 and pin # to 10 and check the Active Low setting on all three.

Here you can see the power of Mach3’s I/O capabilities. Even though we have three axis we
wire them in series and connect them to one input. When Mach3 homes the machine it will do
it one axis at the time and when the switch is hit it reverses the direction of the motor until the
switched is cleared and then it does the next axis. It is even possible to use same switch as
limit switch – Mach3 will know that the switch is a home switch when homing and from there
on it’s considered to be a limit switch.

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Figure 11: Setting up the home switches.

To test the settings and hardware go to the Diagnostics screen and observe the LED’s next to
M1 Home, M2 Home and M3 Home while pushing either one of the switches. The LED’s (all
three of them) should light up when pressing any one of the three switches.

Homing parameters.
Now it’s time to tell Mach3 where we have the home switches mounted. The most common
location for the X- and Y-axis is probably at the most negative position of travel. The Z-axis
is commonly homed to its most positive position of travel. Please note, though that this
position is still called machine zero for the Z-axis thus making all moves in the negative
direction. This is how we will set it up here.

To setup the homing we need to select Home/Limits in the Config menu. When we do that we
will see the dialog in figure 11.

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Figure 12: The Home and Software limits dialog.

Since we want to home the X- and Y-axis in the negative direction we enable the Home Neg
option for X and Y and leave Z unchecked. If we enable the Auto Zero option the Machine
coordinates will automatically be set to zero when the axis is homed. Since we have our
switches at the extreme ends of our travel we want to have this enabled. If the switch is placed
at any other position than at the extreme end the distance can be entered in the Home Off
column. This tells Mach3 to set the Machine Coordinate for the axis to this value instead of
zero – good thing to have. The Speed % setting is at what percentage of the motors full speed
the axis is homed and may or may not need adjustment depending on your particular machine.
Generally, the slower it goes the more accurate it gets. You may need to experiment a bit.

Homing the machine.

With the home switches wired and tested it’s time to home the machine. With the control out
of E-Stop mode, go to the Program Run screen and with one hand on the E-stop button press
the Ref All – Home button. The machine will now start to move Z up until it hits the switch
then it will reverse the axis until it clears it. Then it does the same with the Y-axis and finally
with the X-axis. When each axis is homed the DRO’s should read 0.00 or whatever value you
put in as the Home Off value. If any axis starts to move in the wrong direction press the E-
Stop button and go to the Home/Limits setup and change the Home Neg setting.

Software limits.
Mach3 has the capability to prevent you from damaging your machine by constantly
monitoring its position. If you or a G-code program tries to move it outside its working
envelope it won’t go there but instead present you with an error message. To set this up we go
back to Home/Limits dialog in figure 12.

As we have our home switches located at extreme ends of travel in the negative direction for
the X- and Y-axis we need to set the Soft Min value to 0. Doing so will prevent the machine
from going beyond 0 in the negative direction. In the Soft Max we put whatever amount of
travel we have available. In this case it’s 300mm in X and 100mm in Y. Since we home Z in
the positive direction but still call the home position 0 we need to put 0 as the Soft Max value.
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The Soft Min value is again what amount of travel we have available, 100mm in this case so -
100 (note the negative value) goes into the Soft Min column for the Z-axis.

The Slow Zone setting is the amount travel there’s left in the axis when the machine
automatically starts to slow down when you are approaching a limit. For example, with a
value of 3.00 in the Slow Zone, if we jog the X-axis at high speed towards the negative limit,
which is at 0.00 the machine will start to slow down when it passes 3.00. This prevents the
machine from loosing it’s home position due a too sudden stop of the motors. However, this
automatic breaking is only available when jogging and not when running a G-code program.

To test the software limits the first thing we need to do is to home the machine. Then we need
to enable the software limits by pressing the button labelled Soft Limits on the Program run
screen. When the LED next to the button is green the limits are turned on and we test the
limits by trying to jog past them. Hopefully you want be able to do that and you will get a
message at the bottom of the screen saying: Soft Limits System Movement Aborted.

Final words.
By now we have set up and tuned the main axis of the machine, we have made spindle and
coolant control possible from Mach3 in a safe way due the E-stop and charge pump circuit.
We have established a way to home the machine by the means of home switches and a way to
prevent it from damaging itself with help from the software limits. I think this more or less
covers the basic setup of a three axis milling machine. However……

There is a LOT more that can be done with the Mach3 CNC control application . For
example, spindle speed control, laser scanning of 3D objects, probing, tool changers, plasma
cutting, tangential knife cutting and so on. The list can be made very long.

Welcome to the world of CNC and Mach3, this is just the beginning!

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