Intermittent Z axis inconsistencies

Troubleshooting
1

After upgrading to 0.70, Z axis is behaving very strangely:

I had to tear down the machine today to adjust the motor mounting screws. After I got the machine back together, I tried to lower the Z axis completely and one of the stepper motors (the one opposite the power cord/dust collector) would not turn on at all.

In order to lower the machine, I resorted to turning it by hand. After this, I made another command and it began working again, but still cuts out intermittently.

After getting both motors to bottom out, if I run a 10 mm up command, it seems like both follow, but if I do 10 mm down, one goes all the way as expected, and the other gets approx. 70-80% of the way there, requiring another command in order to bottom out.

I’ve checked the wire connection and it all seems clean.

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2

At another thread’s recommendation, I did update firmware/index/yaml.

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3

We had some boards which had soldering issues on the stepper motor driver chips which could cause behavior like this. We tried to catch them all in testing, but that’s my guess for the culprit.

Shoot a message to anna@maslowcnc.com and we’ll get you a replacement in the mail asap

4

Thank you! Just reached out to Anna!

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5

We received our new PCB, and successfully reinstalled and have updated firmware. Here is a strange one, though, when we went to began calibration today, I tested the Z axis and again the top Z axis motor did not move. The bottom one moved fine. For the sake of troubleshooting, I switched the plugs, plugging the top motor into the bottom port. It moved fine. Switching back, no movement. It seems that either we got a second bad PCB board, or there is some kind of a software glitch affecting just the top the axis motor.

6

Aaron Richards wrote:

We received our new PCB, and successfully reinstalled and have updated
firmware. Here is a strange one, though, when we went to began calibration
today, I tested the Z axis and again the top Z axis motor did not move. The
bottom one moved fine. For the sake of troubleshooting, I switched the plugs,
plugging the top motor into the bottom port. It moved fine. Switching back, no
movement. It seems that either we got a second bad PCB board, or there is some
kind of a software glitch affecting just the top the axis motor.

try loading the default maslow.yaml, it defines what pins on the cpu control
each stepper driver, so if it’s corrupt, it isn’t doing what it thinks it is.

David Lang

7

I tried this already, unfortunately. Same results.

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8

Stay tuned. Just realized that the yaml didn’t auto replace when I loaded it. Just deleted and reloaded. It seems to be better. I’ll keep testing!

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