I’m still relatively new to this Maslow thing, but I had it running fairly smoothly a few weeks ago. I’m trying to cut fairly large arcs that cover most of the sheet. A few days ago, webcontrol started reporting a lost USB connection in the middle of my cuts.
The weird part is that this lost connection only occurs when the sled is in the upper right quadrant of the board. The cuts are completely symmetrical, so every cut that happens in the upper right quadrant is mirrored in the upper left, but the dropped connection only happens when the sled is in the upper right. It’s happened many, many times, so I’m convinced that this isn’t a coincidence and that there’s something about that location.
After the USB timeout, the connection is automatically re-established after a few seconds. It appears to me that the arduino is rebooting. I base this on the fact that the log reports “PCB v1.3 TLE5206 Detected” shortly after the connection timeout. I’m not very familiar with the firmware code, but it looks to me like this would only be printed during the setup() function.
So, why is the arduino rebooting?
Is rebooting the problem, or just a side effect of losing connection?
Is there a way to turn on additional debugging to help me diagnose this?
Is there a way to extend the communication timeout? (Could it be that simple?)
Other ideas?
Some details:
Nothing has changed in my setup between when things were working correctly and when this problem started happening. All code is up to date. I’m running holey calibration firmware.
I did make some minor changes to the gcode between when it was working and when this started. These involved changing depth and changing the number of sub-arcs that are used create the larger arcs. I don’t see how this could be the problem, unless breaking the arc into more gcode commands somehow causes an overflow or something. But why only in the upper right?
The line of gcode where I lose connection varies, but it’s always a G3 command. G3 commands near the bottom of the board do not cause the loss of connection, and not every G3 in the upper right causes the problem. The symmetrical G2 commands on the left side of the workspace never have an issue.
I suspect some sort of interference, but there are no communication or power wires particularly near to where this happens. In fact, there are other parts of the cut where the sled comes much closer to these wires, and there are no problems there. But interference can be a funny thing and difficult to track down. I could see interference causing communication errors, but could it really cause the arduino to reboot?
When the lost connection occurs, the left motor is doing almost all of the work. The sled is being pulled from the right side of the workspace pretty much directly towards the left motor. Perhaps this motor is over-taxed and causing problems.
Some things that I’ve tried, none of which help:
Moved wires to mitigate interference.
Ran extension cords to plug things into different outlets.
Modified the gcode so that the router is doing a very shallow cut to minimize resistance so the left motor doesn’t have to work so hard.
Disabled all the Windows 10 USB sleep/power management settings.
Swapped out the motor control board. (I was desperate and I had a spare.)
Things I still want to try:
Run through the gcode with the router turned off.
Replace the arduino (but I don’t know how to do this – I’ll ask about that in a separate thread).
Change the power supply.
Continue trying to mitigate interference.
Replace the G3 commands with G1 commands. (Maslow reports that it is already doing this because of the large radius, but it’s worth a shot and simple to do.)
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Eric
