Linuxwould not start today -5

Thanks for the replies and apologizes for the excessive number of useless posts. To answer your questions:

Install was done from live CD and consisted of Ubuntu 10.04 and Linuxcnc 2.5.1.

uname -r returns 2.6.32-122-rtai

No pendant/gamepad is programmed nor attached.

Attached error message as several doc types without reading the instruction list of acceptable types.

Will attach again as a .zip and .doc

Again thanks for your time and patience.

there's no need to start a fresh thread , don't worry over what you think may be a useless post ,

anyhow to answer your question , it would be a good idea to download a new live cd iso and wipe the pc clean and do a new install , it does indeed look as the realtime is not being loaded
this could be down to a corrupt file , sometimes making a fresh copy helps

did you update any files belonging to the kernel or run any updates ?

Thanks to all the good advice. I have been beating my head against a wall trying to get my machine up so I can actually make a cut and thanks to the great support here, I think there is truly a light at the end of the tunnel. I went back into the BIOS and turned every thing back on that I have shut down in an attempt to improve my computer's latency and linuxcnc started right up. It is still giving me latency issues but at least now I can run the program and see if I am gaining or losing ground.

An issue with stepper driver timing is also puzzling me, I had difficulty finding the timing requirements for my Longs Motors (China) drivers so was using Wanti Motor timing that was posted in the Kiki and was successfully moving things around. In my attempt to improve and make the system better, I contacted Longs and received their timing requirements which I am attaching and asking for your interpretation for the right input into Stepconf Wizard. I tried my interpretation and my motors would only make a little noise but would not move.

Again thanks for the great response!

Thanks for the quick response. I tried the 2000, 2000, 5000, and 5000 timing but the motors will not respond at. Looking for a set of numbers that did work I found that WANTI driver timing listed in the WIKI worked. They are 5050, 5050, 500, 500. they seemed so far off of the numbers I interpreted from the Longs data, and you also suggested that I hoped to do better with the Manufactures (?) data. That doesn't seem to be the case and for now the Wanti data appears to be the best. I tried one of the preloaded sets in the Wizard and they worked but the Wanti seems smoother.

The biggest problem that I am now experiencing is the Z axis (installed as the A) will not come close to the correct scale, any thoughts?

these are standard drives and work well with linuxcnc , but don't try as Andy has mentioned to push them to the limits
firstly what microstepping have you set the drives too ?

what type of machine is it etc
give us some information on the drive train ... type of ballscrew pitch etc

what power supply ( volts & Amps ) ?
driver board ?

these timings work fine with these drives
DIRSETUP = 20000
DIRHOLD = 20000
STEPLEN = 5000
STEPSPACE = 5000

latency issues could also affect the above , so the more information we have the better

post your hal and ini files is always a good help

Thank you guys for the great input and great turnaround time. I assume one response answering both of your questions will be visible to all.

To get the entire story out:
I have constructed a tubular steel table and gantry with aluminium parts. All guides are totally supported 20 mm rods with bearings. The gantry is powered with two steppers with 4:1 belt reducers and a one inch pitch pinion on the rack. The Y Axis is set up the same. These three motor at set 1/10 micro-stepping. The Z Axis is direct drive to a 10 tpi acme precision screw. It is set at 1/4 micro-stepping. I have two power supplies, one producing 4.2 amps at 48 VDC and one producing 8.3 VDC. The Motors are Chuangwei Motor and Electric. The tree on the X and Y axis are model 85BYGH450B-03B eight wire and the Z is model 57BYGH310 four wire. The eight wire motors are all wire as bi-polar parallel. The Z axis driver (DM542A) is set to provide 1.91 peak amps and 1.3 RMS. The other drivers (DM860A) are set to provide 2.8 peak and 2.0 RMS. The BOB is also from Longs and is a six axis, optically coupled unit. My computer is an old that I assembled years (maybe eleven) years ago. It is AMD Athlon XP powered on a Micro Star board KT3 Ultra2 with VIA KT333 and VIA VT8235 chip sets. The AGP MSI graphic accelerator is unfortunately nVIDIA G4MX460-VTP.

Latency numbers are:
Beginning of test ~ 23000 ns
After running over night at idle - 76,000 ns
Opening a Open Office Word.doc - 11,092826
Using Fire Fox after several minutes - 218675 ns

I assume it is the video card and would like to change to the common NV driver but not sure how or which driver it is, there are several loaded on my system. My system is only loaded with Ubuntu and Linuxcnc at present. I did try the VESA driver but the system slowed to the point it was difficult to get to the web. I have disabled the power management abilities in BIOS.

The scaling problem with the Z axis is that the computer is showing the head is moving up or down 1 inch but in reality it is moving only about 3/8 inch. The X and Y axis are pretty close together (computer to table) so haven't gotten to attempt to refine their scale yet. The Z is set up on the A axis in the Wizard. Does anything have to be changed somewhere to change from a angular axis to a linear axis?

I'm attaching my conf and hal files as they exist this morning.

one item I notice in your hal file is the parrell port reset time is

setp parport.0.reset-time 2000

perhaps try increasing to
setp parport.0.reset-time 5000

your using an old motherboard and theirs also optoisolators involved they invariably like to have time on their hands , are their also optos in the BOB ? , are these also on the step direction lines , as you will in effect have 2 opto's in series
as the stepper drives also have opto's , it would be good if that's the case to isolate the appropriate ones on the BOB .

1 inch pitch and microstepping , i'd lower the microstepping to half step (400 steps ) to start with then once it's all working correctly then move up , but remember the higher the microstepping becomes the less torque you have at the motor , so this affects
the start of the move as that's when you need torque to move mass ,

you say 8.3vdc ?? I presume you meant 8.3A and that their both 48v power supplies

ok so 200 steps per rev x 1/4 micro step ( x4) = 800 x 10tpi = 8000 steps ... which I believe you have in your ini file , so i'd recon either it's missing steps or perhaps your switch settings are incorrect on your stepper drive

your axis are set for linear so no changes needed ( see your ini file )