Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

right on. ok..then i would be focusing on the cable (and its connections) that is being used between the Acorn and the Hypertherm.

It's the Hypertherm cable from what I can tell from all the pics on Hypertherm's website and others that sell the Hypertherm CPC cable. It's not a generic or DIY cable. The voltage check I did coming out of the Hypertherm was done right at the Acorn where the divided voltage passed through the CPC cable and I measured it with my Fluke multimeter.

It looks exactly like this cable from Hypertherm.

first measuring voltage at the cable from Hypertherm . the DVM high impedance so say you read 2.66 volt that read with no load on it .
Then you hook it to the Acorn and voltage low . What causes this most of the time and open connection or one barely touching like 1 strand in cable
is your cpc cable 1 piece? or do you have connector in it are the pins good them pins could be bad open connector check might be broken wire . ohm a cable wont find this problem . todays meters high impedance so theirs no load on voltage out put
the other is the Hypertherm voltage output cant handle load due to bad bord or it output bord or bad solder joint . or wire
i ask Hypertherm what kind resister load you can use to test the cpc voltage . or Mabe acorn can tell us what load is on the voltage input of it card

i bet your problem is a bad wire . solder joint or bad component in Hypertherm . or a thc card swap from acorn quick test

A real Hypertherm cpc cable have Hypertherm pn on it each par wires are in separate shield the cable strand tined ..Belden 8777 CM 3pr22
lots oem make there own cable use cat 6 or something else the mess up the pin crimp with not using the tool right

This is the raw cable Hypertherm uses if your cable not this it most likely not Hypertherm https://www.belden.com/products/cable/e ... cable/8777
they use an amp connector

Jeff, I tested the voltage per Hypertherms instructions. I tested the voltage at the CPC port on the Hypertherm and at the end of the CPC cable at the Acorn. Numbers were the same. The tech at Hypertherm, Bob, walked me through everything and the voltage is correct coming out of the Hypertherm. He even made sure I was using a good quality meter and I have a Fluke multimeter. He said make sure not to use a Harbor Freight meter and I'm not.

The shielded CPC cable I'm using is the same one that came with the machine and worked perfectly with the WINCNC software that was on the machine. It's the same shielded CPC cable I started with when I started beta testing with Centroid. It's worked all along with no issues. My issues started when I upgraded through the beta versions of the software. I have not changed any grounds or added any grounds. The wiring is the same as it's always been.

What ever came out of this issue?

last i heard the machine was cutting?

Shawn updated to the release 6.44. This release has a lower voltage threshold for the "arc ok" via the TX board. This helped shawn with being able to calibrate. As of Friday he was cutting with THC and was doing great. I wanted to check out the plots from his THC at some point. I think he said he was going to update to 4.66r2 yesterday or at some point this week and let us know how it's going.

Sorry for the delay, I did install 4.66 last Friday and calibrated and it was cutting good. I was away from the shop today at another tool auction and plan to update to 4.66r2 tomorrow and hope the results are the same.

Joey, I’ll text you when I’m done if you want to see any plots from the machine. I’m curious if you’ll still see low voltage readings or not.

Keith mentioned that I can do a simple “restore report” going from 4.66 to 4.66r2 so that’ll speed things up.

Thanks for the support guys.

It seems like the voltage issue is still hiding somewhere in the system. If I calibrate the THC with 1/4" material it'll cut 1/4" material all day long with no issues. As soon as I change thickness I start having low voltage issues again. I've been cutting hundreds of aluminum i-beams for the past two week so I just set the THC Mode to "smart sense" and this keeps me cutting when changing material thickness.

I've tried many different things and triple checked the voltages on the equipment per Bob at Hypertherm. Oddly everything checks out. I've moved the work lead from the table to the material with maybe a volt or two difference in the target volts. I've learned that it's not really about the target volts but more the cut height. Maintaining that .060 cut height is very important for good clean cuts. All grounds are good, new consumables don't help, seems like used ones give better calibration results.

I think I've watched every video that Jim Colt has put out on YouTube and learned quite a bit while searching for that illusive fix for my voltage issues. Seems like "smart sense" is working for now. I'll revisit this when I'm through with the current job.