Triumph problem...

[Kev Williams]

First off, this does not surprise me one bit....

in the 'Epilog isn't cutting right' thread, I mentioned that in 33 years of running computer controlled machines, when something electrical is wrong, almost always the steppers make noise, but the machine will, almost always, run reasonably normally when something mechanical is amiss...

So before the day was out, Murphy's law, 'the gods', or whovever, just had to prove me wrong. And the way my luck's been running lately, it doesn't surprise me...

The problem: My Triumph just messed up a stainless operator panel. I have several engraving areas laid out in different colors so as to speed up the engraving process. In this pic, the perimeter borders are red, and done using a vector island fill; the horizontal lines between words are yellow-- the far left out-of-whack connector 'triangle's are black, the correct connectors to the right are green, the row of not-correct vertical lines are magenta, the next pairs not correct are cyan, and off to the right out of the picture are orange and blue...



the order the engraving was done was orange-red-green-blue-cyan-magenta-black.

What happened is, the machine did everything perfect until it finished doing "blue", but started the cyan section wrong, followed by the magenta and black sections.

S0, when it finishes the blue, it moves to cyan and engraves in the wrong place. But here's the kicker. If I send the cyan job by itself, it engraves it where it's supposed to.

There's no funny noised, and no loose parts. And I can repeat this issue as many times as I want. After blue, cyan engraves wrong. Cyan by itself, it engraves perfect. In this closeup, you can see where the cyan started engraving in the right place.



?????

I made a video of this that's going on YouTube as soon as I find time. I'll be contacting Yolanda at Triumph so she and whoever else at the factory can watch.

I'm totally baffled, I can't think of a single reason for the machine to do this...??

And another kicker-- I did this panels twin last night, and it came out absolutely perfect, in every way. I probably had the color order different, but why should that make any difference?
This is what it's supposed to look like:



Murphy's law works...

Anyone have any ideas??

[Kev Williams]

Seems my problem may be software based--

I've received 2 versions of the "PH" software supplied to me, one is "PHCad 4.47", the other is "PHSoft 5.76". They're the same program, PHSoft is a newer version. I've been using PHCad because it works well and is "stable", whereas PHSoft works great (I like some of the upgrades) but is anything BUT stable. It constantly crashes, or develops anomolies that only a computer reboot will fix, or my favorite, it will randomly change my backlash settings into strange gobbledygook numbers that cause the left and right sweep alignments to be misaligned by more than 1/4" -- These are just the issues I know about. So I avoid using it.

But for kicks this morning, I saved the job, then opened it in PHSoft and ran it-- and it ran perfectly, engraving went where it was supposed to go. Re-open the job in PHCad, and it repeats the mistake...

Kind of a relief, as it seems my machine is okay, and is doing 'what it's told'. So now it seems I can't trust either version of this software. I'm not sure, but I believe this software is similar to Laserworks. Here's a screen shot of PHSoft.