please hold
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OK. swapped the arm with another and still “motor not found bottom-right”. everything else is same.
I’ll have a closer look at the PCB
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That sounds like the likely culprit. I’ll get a new one in the mail ASAP.
thanks man
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ok… my OCD got the better of me.
I was curious what would happen if I swapped all of the arms around. so I shifted all of the arms one position left (clockwise). and viola! all motors reported in.
I do think there is another issue though - I think there is too much belt to be spooled in. and that is causing the sensor to think that the belt is tight and stopping the retract
Excellent! I’m still sending you a spare board anyway to be safe.
I packed the absolute maximum amount of belt that would * fit * on there because I figured cutting it shorter is always an option, but we can’t add more and for some folks who want to use 12 foot + spacing on a garage floor that could be necessary. You can absolutely chop a foot off each belt and it will still work fine and they might spool up easier.
Clicking the “Retract All” button a second time might also fix it. I have one arm that occasionally does that, but clicking it again always fixes it.
Having the spools full to the absolute maximum like that is normal.
I should also not that I had to hit “retract all” a number of times (like 10 ish ish times) to get the belts all the way in. its like something in there was sensing the belt was in when it was not. I have gone around all the arms and loosened the ring nuts-n-bolts. not sure. I will play with it more. to see if “extend-all” works too
Thanks for your help Bar.
chgeers
/dave
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I am working on making that current threshold for when it senses that the arms are all the way in a setting that you can change so hopefully in next week’s release it will be possible to configure that for your machine.
suggestion: when you put the captive locking nuts in the arms, to keep them from falling out as you turn it over to mount the motors thread in a couple bolts, only until they hit resistance (not into the nylock portion)
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the setscrews seem easy to lose, it would not be a bad idea to include an extra
also, at the risk of an additional thing, a 3d printed (or molded bearing setter with a larger end to push on would be nice (I was worried about damaging it as I was pushing in the bearing, and it hurts to push on)
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I noticed that some of the idler gears did not rotate smoothly on the shafts, they will wear in quickly, but in the meantime they may present extra friction at unexpected times (may help explain the retraction stopping, it may help to try and rotate the spool manually to get it over a hump)
it would be very nice to be able to hook up each arm as it’s completed to the controller and instruct it to retract that belt (especially when you end up assembling things over multiple sessions.
when you have trouble getting a bolt to catch on a nut, put an extra nut on the nut side of it to hold the nut you are trying to catch all the way down
the initial one that you put in that is covered by the sensor would need some way to keep the extra nuts from shorting pins on the sensor (possibly a bit of tape around them so they don’t slide around???)
when loading the nuts onto the bottom of the arm to join them, you can load a bunch of nuts onto the allen wrench at one time and then go from hole to hold dropping one in.
I put everything on the top half, including the spool, and then fed the belt through the bottom half. that way you can keep the top half upside down while you join them, so nothing is falling (just the fight to get everything aligned)
I actually found joining the two arm halves less of a headache than joining the cable end halves.
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On some - such as the ones under the encoder board - a touch of superglue holds them in place so there is no movement when you start installing the machine screws.
it would be useful to have a couple rods that fit in the belt tooth gears so that you can put the gears on the top half with the rods in them, then put the bottom over them using the rods to line things up.
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the shaft spacing of the motor and the idler gear are just a hair too close to each other, the idler shaft is angled and hard to assemble (and very hard to align)
in the next redesign, rotate the motor 45 degrees and put the bolts in all the way from the other side so that you can have a little slack on the gears when assembling the two halves and then tighten them through the bottom
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on the cable ends, right now you have a circle with sharp corners to the straight portion, add a radius to those corners to make it easier for the belt to go around that
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then should regular nuts be used vs where should the locking nuts be used. I happened to have a good 2mm hex wrench, and happened to open the package with the nylock nuts and worked from that until after I finished all the arms and needed the short screws for the steppers
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there seems to be a missing step that connects the upright pieces together
you show puttng the nuts down deep in the uprights, but never show anything connecting to those nuts, t looks like you are supposed to put the nuts in 4 of them, then connect the other 4, something like that
loctite on the screws holding the leadscrew nuts doulc be a good idea.
I think it’s easier to assemble the verticals from the bottom than with the router weight/cable to fight with (but I have a non-standard router, so will have to tweak things anyway)
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I used locking nuts everywhere except for the arms. We originally planned to use the regular nuts and then upgraded to the locking ones only after we had already bought the other ones so we sent both. In the future we will probably only include the locking nuts. The one exception is on the belt end parts where there is not enough space for the locking nuts so regular nuts have to be used.
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yes it is, I didn’t notice it describing the assembly until I went looking long
after.
David Lang
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