Error Message that Sled is not Keeping Up

I’ve seen people report problems with zaxis only moving in one direction. I don’t know how they ever overcame it, but maybe trying wiping the eeprom. I thinks it under actions, advanced.

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And you don’t want to cut all they way through the board. This machine can’t cut 3/4 inch plywood that deep in a single pass. And for calibration, you only need to cut a shallow groove to make the measurements. Get the zaxis working before trying to calibrate.

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Yes, I just purchased it one month ago and set it up with the Z axis. By the instructions, it is quadrilateral, but by description, I’d think of it as triangular. I bought it from Maker Made - through Maslow’s site.

I’ll try wiping the eeprom and calibrating as triangular, then.

We had no option for bit depth - it wouldn’t adjust to anything we did. We eyeballed 3/4 inch so it wouldn’t go deeper than the board, but the Z axis controls wouldn’t allow us to shorten the bit length as anticipated.

It’s definitely triangular. Can you point to the instructions that say its quadrilateral?

Try wiping the eeprom and make sure you can get the zaxis to move correctly before trying the calibration process. If things seem weird, try ‘define zero’ on the zaxis regardless of where it is and then try to do some up and down moves.

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We chose the setup that is not triangular, however - the one where the chains each make a Z shape and are counterbalanced by a nylon/stretchy cord. Was that a bad call?

I think you are confusing two things. Triangular/Quadrilateral refer to how the chains are attached to the sled. You are using a ring kit, I assume, and that’s triangular.

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The original design that used fixed L-brackets mounted to the sled is quadrilateral… only a few stragglers use this.

image

The “chains each make a Z shape” is related to the slack take up and that’s either ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ chain feed. If your chains are horizontal along the top beam, you are ‘bottom’ feed.

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If your chains are vertical along the side, you are ‘top’ feed.

image

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Okay - we tried recalibrating three times using the triangular system after wiping the eeprom like you suggested. It repeated our original problem: the sled can’t keep up. However, the bit is retracted so it isn’t even touching the board - there’s no way it has any drag so this has to be a computational error.

It also gave the following error, which makes no sense because I manually entered the values that the machine gave us for the last calibration (we carefully measured the other measurements as well):

Also, we’ve never entered the values showing up in the error message and the machine continued to adjust downward regardless of what we told it when we were “adjusting chain lengths” using ground control.

New thoughts?

Thank you for the clarification - we used all of these parameters in our most recent calibrations. We had the same results as I described in my previous reply.

Thanks.

That error message suggests that you aren’t following the calibration procedure correctly, particularly the part where you ‘adjust’ chains after measuring the distance between motors. When you ‘adjust chain lengths’, the sled isn’t attached.

Are you following the wiki post precisely?

First, the sled was attached when we were trying to adjust the chains.

As to following the instructions precisely, the answer is both yes, and no.

  1. As a for instance, I can’t see the images on the quadralateral versus triangular post so your input on that was helpful. No calibration images load during any stage of the process on Ground Control on my computer.
  2. As a second for instance, the instructions tell me to change extend chain settings under “Settings > Advanced Settings,” but this is not an available path on my Ground Control. This makes it so I can’t change the “Extend Chain Distance” to 1651. That said, we were able to figure out how to do this in a step during the calibration process - but I didn’t connect the dots until now.
  3. As a third for instance, it won’t let me adjust the sprockets to vertical position unless I take all of the chains off … and then sometimes, that doesn’t work either. We took all of the chains off a few times and only to find that the buttons do nothing at all. Accordingly, I’ve skipped this step several times because pushing the buttons does nothing with or without the chains. It seems superfluous to waste an extra 15 minutes to take the chains off only for it not to work. Just to be precise in following instructions, I just took the chains off and tried it again but the buttons are doing nothing.

That link would have been uber helpful to have at the beginning of this process, though. Maslow should include that link with information on how to set up the machine. We got two separate sets of instructions from them and one was very different than the other and we haven’t known which one was better and which one was outdated, only by trial and error. Still, the instructions on that link are much better than what we had before.

I’ll update you if I make any progress.

Are you able to point us to the two instruction sets you were given to use?

Also, for the advanced settings, click settings and then click the very top button (I think it says Maslow settings). Took me a long time to figure out that it was a button and not a heading.

Follow the wiki post… hopefully it will get you there.

And as a warning, I never finished the wiki post with how to do the cutting, measurement, and calibration…

I don’t know which instructions are which. We received one from a link from the product and another from a link from an email. That’s all I remember and once we built the machine, we got rid of those instructions. Trying to calibrate from the links was a disaster so we started looking online for help. I found this forum by searching for an answer to a specific problem.

We got it working … hurray … sort of. “Center” is over two inches inaccurate (to the right). No clue how to fix that but hopefully the testing cuts will help.

When we defined “Zero” for the Z axis, it promptly ignored that. While making the test cuts, it kept stopping to give me error messages about the Z axis and asking me to adjust it: -2mm and then +5mm in rapid succession error messages. Of course, I can’t do that because when I go to adjust the Z axis, none of the buttons change the depth and I have to stop the cut to go back.

We tried another cut after the test cuts and the bit cut the path to the test cut and back. It worked, but the cut was smaller than expected and it cut between paths, which is our new problem.

Thanks for your help - I’ll start looking for Z-axis solutions now …

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You have z axis disabled. Go to settings and enable it.

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Gero
So if the heat sink aren’t properly place, one could expect to have this type of issue.
I’m currently experiencing this problem. with the sled.
After many calibrations,nothing at all.

@joramos10 The warning ‘Sled is not keeping up’ has mostly other reasons that a faulty shield. If you have fried one of the chips, this is almost always noticed by one of the motors not moving. To have the heat sinks attached properly is essential. Thinking about my post from '18, I would not recommend the zip-tie approach today. If you had no ‘accidents’ and have not been running the Maslow without heat sinks, your motor-shield should be fine. How far do you get? Calibration completed without errors?

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I think resetting the calibration values to the defaults before starting might help address this. If the values end up really wonky it can be tough to go forwards

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When I’ve done the calibrations. I go all the way with no errors. Even get the test cut no issue. The last time I ran the machine it looked like no issue. But in the middle of the cut one left motor decided to stop, and the right one continued to run. Went as far as replacing the left motor. The same issue came up, the machine loosing the position of the sled and having to redo the chain calibration. Is like a hit and miss, and when I saw your most on the controller. I wonder if that is the main issue that I’m coming across. I don’t know if there is something that you have seen and/or come across that somewhat resembles this same issue. but any input is appreciated in advance.

I’ve been hibernating my Maslow for over a year now, so not a source for up to date information.
Anyhow my thoughts…
If you have not run your machine without the heat sinks, have not have the chain wrap around the sprocket, do not have a more then 16kg sled and not running in a high temperature region without AC, I still think the motor shield should be OK.
You have eliminated one possible source, the encoder on the motor could have been faulty, but you replaced the motor, so that is excluded.

I’ve fried 3 of the original shields, but that was in the early days of debugging GroundControl when some bug would let the Maslow attempt to tear the sled apart by moving it up way to far.
Usually the chips fry by shortening and then the motor will not move at all. This was with 2 shields. The 3rd was showing that it was faulty by delivering unpredictable distances on clear defined moves.

I was one of the first to switch to a TLE5206 thanks to an honorable donor.
My confidence in the original shield was compromised and having each motor on a separate chip and surviving more Amps made sense to me. Never fried a shield since then.

With a challenge like this where you can’t point your finger directly on the issue, I use the exclusion approach listing all the possible causes in order of their likelihood and excluding them one by one.

I would possibly go this route.

  • confirm that the feed-rate in GC is set to default
  • create a test .nc to run dry (without a bit or Z way up in the air), something like a big ellipse with no z-moves at slow feed-rate
  • run the ellipse.nc at low feed-rate first and move the motor cable, to check if the error can triggered mechanically (possible loose plug, weak solder spot or a broken cable)
  • use the search and replace function of an text editor to slowly increase the feed-rate in the ellipse file, to check if feed-rates make a difference
  • (at own risk) set the Position error limit to something high ~20 --> Keeping-Up
  • last but not least, start from zero, --> save you GC .ini file somewhere safe, delete the original, wipe the eeprom of the Arduino and flash the firmware again. After the first start of GC a new .ini is written. Close GC and replace the new .ini with the one you saved. Start over with calibration.

I know this is not highly motivating ;-), I’ve done it dozens of times. Crossing my fingers and wishing you luck. Kind regards, Gero

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last but not least, start from zero, --> save you GC .ini file somewhere safe, delete the original, wipe the eeprom of the Arduino and flash the firmware again. After the first start of GC a new .ini is written. Close GC and replace the new .ini with the one you saved. Start over with calibration.

Where exactly the GC.ini file is at.
Could I just wipe eeprom, and start a new calibration