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CS-Lab s.c. | CSMIO/IP-A 6-axis CNC controller. Manual tunning
3. First axis run
1) Set the axis manually in the middle of its motion range.
2) Go to the "Configure/Plugins/CSMIO/IP-CS-
Lab/Motors/Motor 0/PID Tuning" window
and set the value of the "Error Alarm Thresh-
old" parameter to a value that corresponds to
approx. 5 mm axis movement. To determine
this value, you should multiply 5 times the
value of "Counts Per Unit" in the "Motors"
window. In this case, "Error Alarm Threshold"
= 10000 x 5. Such a configuration will prevent
the axis from uncontrolled, covering a distance greater than 5mm. This value will be reduced at the end
of the manual tuning process, but now it must have such a high value because of the freedom of further
actions.
3) Set the initial "kP" parameter value (propor-
tional gain) to 0.01. The value is enough in
most cases. At this stage, the "kP" value
should be high enough, so the axis does not
crawl under the influence of the "Zero Offset"
parameter, which is not set yet, and can exe-
cute slow motion commands issued e.g. from
the "JOG". You should not use higher values
of the "kP" parameter than necessary be-
cause it may have a negative impact on the final tuning effect.
4) Switch Mach4 to "Enable" and try to make a slow move in "Jog" mode. It is recommended to use a very
low "Jog Rate%" value; usually, 1% is enough. Such a low value is used since our goal at present is only
to check that the axis will respond correctly to motion commands.
If immediately after switching Mach4 to the "Enable" state or at the time
of trying to make the first move, the axis will make a sudden movement
of about 5mm (see point 2), and the message "PID Fault" will be dis-
played (shown on the right), it will mean that you should change the
counting direction of an encoder to the opposite using the "Encoder Re-
verse" option (photo below).
Strenuous attempts to manually select the value of the "Zero Offset" parameter, which is the voltage
offset of the +/- 10V analog signal at this stage do not make sense and are only a waste of time. This is
because many users waste a lot of time trying to use this parameter to stop the axis from creeping, i.e.
from making slow and uncontrolled axis motion when the PID regulator of the CSMIO/IP-A controller po-
sition is not tuned yet.
