rp1007 wrote:
I rebuilt my anchor points to make them stiffer, and I’ve been trying and failing to recalibrate. When I initially extend and tighten belts, it tells me I have invalid geometry with belts too short, and then when I try to do Extend All and then Find Anchor Positions, it initially retracts, tells me I have invalid geometry (apparently based on expected Z positions) and then starts slowly extending the belts. Forever until I turn the Maslow off.
Do I have to measure the Z positions more accurately (my stiffening thing raised them up by about 75mm)? Or could it be something about the ancient tablet and browser I’m using in the shop? I noticed that the interface becomes pretty much nonresponsive while the extending is going on (which might make sense if the browser is just running way more calculation than it can handle). If I have to bring a real laptop in to calibrate, that would be OK, but I really don’t want to sacrifice my daily laptop to the dust of regular operations…
you have two very different issues here, one that is easy to fix, the other is
showing a problem we have run into a few times but never been able to debug. If
you can reproduce it, it would be fantastic if you can hold off on getting the
machine fully operational to help us debug it.
the hard to debug issue is whatever is happening that causes the belts to feed
out slowly until you power off.
please find a long usb cable and connect to the maslow (you can use any terminal
software, or you can use the fluidterm program that comes packaged with each of
the firmware upgrade zip packages
connect to the maslow with the terminal program and you should see some things
happening (if you hit enter, you should get a ok back, if you type $test you
should get test, if you hit $cmd you should get a list of commands) we don’t
need you to run any commands, just leave it connecting and capturing the logs
while you do whatever it is that causes it to go into the slow-extend mode, then
upload what it shows.
If you need to get the machine operational, or for any other reason don’t want
to take the time for the debugging, yes, raising the anchors will make a big
difference and the machine needs to be told about this.
did you raise them all the same amount? or are you using something like my
bolt-down anchors that raise them different amounts for each arm?
if you raise them the same amount, you can account for this in the
spoilboard/wasteboard thickness setting. this setting is the distance from where
the anchors are (bottom surface of the belt end extensions) to where the top of
the spoilboard is (aka the bottom of the sled when doing ‘find anchors’) a
positive number means the spoilboard is higher than the anchors, a negative
number says it is lower than the anchors.
If they are at different heights, then you need to set the Z offsets
individually. go to the fluidnc tab, select the right bubble, then scroll down
to find the anchor positions (tlx, tly, tlz etc) and set the z values. This is
the distance down from where the bottom of the belt end extensions are on the
arms when fully retracted, and where they are at the anchor
feel free to ask if I am not clear on anything.
once this is all set
disconnect the belts, retract all, run the Z all the way down and hit the set Z
stop button (not the same as set z home), then extend all to feed them out,
connect to the anchors and hit find anchors
David Lang
