I have had an issue 2 times now and it resulted in a broken belt. I’m using firmware 1.13 and in a horizontal setup. The first day I believe the Maslow was in Ready to Cut state (but I am not positive) and I asked it to jog. Instead, it spooled out all of the belts rapidly (apparently faster than an Extend All command). I hit the emergency stop by cutting the power. I untangled the belts, spooled them up by hand, then retracted all and got it back to a state where it could be shut down in Ready to Cut state. The next day it was back in ready to cut state and it dropped the network connection (maslow.local only) for maybe the first time ever. It showed a message that the Yaml might be corrupt. I restarted. I tried to load a saved Yaml file that has worked before and got a failure notice. I gave up on that, and restarted several times. Cycled through Extend/retract a couple times. Then finally it said “ready to cut”. I asked it to jog. It did the same thing as the day before and spit out all of the belts. This time I let it run and I manually pulled on the belts to keep them from tangling. They extended all the way out and it looked physically fine. I retracted all and it seemed fine. I don’t think I got a Ready to Cut state but I didn’t know what to do so I tried to jog it and that’s when the top right belt snapped under tension.
I disassembled the Maslow to get to the broken belt. Everything looked fine, but there was a small kink in the broken belt (see photo). Possibly it had been trapped somewhere. All the other belts look fine but I will inspect them when I get the new belt, reassemble and extend all.
So, was this Spooling Out caused by a software error or corrupt file or did I cause it by a bad sequence of commands?
Version 1.13 introduced some bugs, recommend you go to version 1.15. I haven’t read of anyone having a similar problem to yours. While you have the arms apart I would recommend you check they can revolve freely before reassembly, it may require sanding and lubricating.
Until you have everything settled in I strongly recommend you be ready to power off if anything looks like it is going wrong
This is the bug introduced in V1.13, fixed in V1.14 and tidied up a bit more in V1.15
You should not be able to jog, unless you are in the ready to Cut State. I trust you were using the Maslow menu to enter commands to jog etc
The sequence to prepare the Maslow for operation is Retract, Extend All and connect your belts to the anchors, if you have already run Find Anchors, then Take Tension and it should go to ready to cut. If you have not run Find Anchors, then after Extend All you run Find Anchors from the Setup menu, If you get a good value you don’t need to run this again, unless your set up changes or you have loose belts when jogging etc.
Depending on where you belt broke you maybe able to salvage it as the belt length is about 4 Metres of it. you may not be able remove it from the spool however (when you get a new belt it comes with a new spool).
Hope this helps
Thank you, Ian, for the helpful response and in particular the sequence of commands. I have not been using Find Anchors, so will start to do so. I will upgrade to firmware 1.15. I heard someone mention that the auto-calibration took hours. My machine is well calibrated, so I assume that I can skip that step?
