stepper motor microstepping vs current.

I had a problem with missed steps on my CNC, as far as I can see it relates to the motor drive current. Higher current more lost steps and vice versa.

Google Sketchup over RDP problem SOLVED

How to make Google Sketchup work over RDP (Remote Desktop).
I have had problems launching sketchup over RDP session, it throws this error:

If Sketchup has been started locally before using RDP it works fine, sometimes is crashes but most of the time it's ok.

I googled and came up with a smart solution:

- Create a Batch file which includes the following two lines:

tscon 1 /dest:console
"C:\Program Files\SketchUp\SketchUp 2017\SketchUp.exe"

- Run the batchfile as administrator (this will diconnect your current remote desktop session)
- Wait the time sketchup normally takes to start before you reconnect the remote desktop. If you reconnect too quickly you will get the OpenGL error.

I also found that you have to disable the startup screen so the sketchup will launch directly into editing mode.

You can also add a path and filename to a SKP file after the .exe line in the batchfile to load a project automatically.

BTW: This assumes that you are using session 1 on the computer.

Mach3 stepper motor problem

Had a problem after testing mach3 for the first time, could not get the stepper motors to move as expected. Only stuttering av vibrating unevenly, did an extensive google search round but I did find any solution for my problem.

I did everything like, switching from WinXP ACPI to standard installation, tried Windows 7 32 bit, nothing helped. tried Other drivers and other motors.

My solutions was enable STEP LOW ACTIVE, that did the trick. The motors are running smooth as silk now.

BTW: I'm currently running a USB breakout board called Novusun NVUM_SK. el cheapo china card. Seems to work fine until now, have read somewhere about some incompability with mach3. I don't know, we'll see.

link to my breakout card, where you can also find the driver plugin for mach3. The card did not kcome with any software included when I bought it at ebay.

Google Spreadsheet importDATA error.

I've been struggling with the IMPORTDATA function in Google Spreadsheet to import CSV data, everything seems to work normally the first time I load the file, but after a while I get NA and error in the spreadsheet, and of course the data is removed from the sheet.

I did read somwhere that the problem may be related to caching of data, I do not know if the problem is local cache or remote cache at google servers.

I found a solution which seems to work better than others, it may not work in your case but try it.

The normal way I add the IMPORTDATA formula is as follows:

=IMPORTDATA("http://www.data.com/testdata")

this fails, the solution I foudn was to add IFERROR and repeat the IMPORTDATA and adding trailing slashes to the URL. Trailing slashes does not seem to alter the url at all (may be a problem if you link directly to a CSV file, I'm using url_rewrite on my webserver), it seems to trick the cache problem. For now I'm using this formula with two nested IFERRORs:

=IFERROR(IMPORTDATA("http://www.data.com/testdata/");IFERROR(IMPORTDATA("http://www.data.com/testdata//");IMPORTDATA("http://www.data.com/testdata///"))) 

You can add more IFERRORS as well with even more trailing slashes.