Hi All, Greetings from Ireland

[Irish_Steve]

Hi Folks, a quick introduction, I'm registering here on the basis of having bought a second hand cutter that's the direct clone of the first device that Russ is using, and it came to me at the right price, with a problem that the previous owner thought was a stepper motor or driver, but that proved not to be the case, and in desperation, as he uses his machine for business, he went out and got a new (larger) one, and sold this one to free up some space at home, so now, I'm in the process of setting up, so some of the information in my profile may not be completely accurate.

So far, all I know is that I've found some very suspect wiring to one of the stepper motors, so I'm going to sort that before I do anything else, I've got a reel of ethernet patch cable, so multi strand, so as it's suitably flexible, I'm going to use each of the twisted pairs as one wire, so that gives me the 4 I need for the motor, and once that's done, I'll see what works or doesn't, but I need to make a table to get it at a sensible height, and once it's up there, I will sort out the mess, clean it, and sort out setting up the software on a Laptop, so I know I've a bit of work to do. I didn't get the CD that was with the original delivery, and I came across the Youtube video that Russ made when he messed up his configuration, so before I go very far, I am going to check that the configuration of my machine passes a sanity check, from the description of the fault, I'm not sure that there are no issues with the settings, but until I get RDWORKS up and running, and can see the configuration data, I won't know if it's good or not.

My background is 50 plus years of working with computer systems, I started on very early bank branch terminals, a very early disc based computer with a mechanical keyboard and golf ball printer, which evolved over time into dot matrix printing, and then moved on to larger systems, and then moved on into writing applications for larger mini computers, as well as PC based flight simulation systems, so I'm reasonably confident that if it's a hardware issue, I should be able to identify and fix it, but that's for later this week, the registration here is to give me the chance to check the basic configuration of my system, and see where I go from there,, and hopefully learn from others experience, and then as I get up to speed, I'd like to hope I too will be able to add to the knowledge base that experience will bring.

The longer term plan is to get it working so that I can make track for a garden railway 0 gauge SM32, using a design package called templot, which will allow me to laser cut the sleepers for the track I want, and also resin print the chairs that hold the track, which is a project that's been on hold for a very long time, due to a flood relief scheme that meant we didn't have access to our garden for a very long time, that's now finished, so I'm at last able to start work on sorting out the railway, and hopefully get something running in a few months time, it's radio controlled live steam, so a bit special, I have the locomotives and rolling stock, and some premade track, the Templot work will concentrate on points and junction works, which is the expensive part I don't have much of at the moment. Longer term, laser cut ply for rolling stock is also a strong possibility.

That I hope is enough for now.

Cheers

Steve