The erratic / faded appearance of the LEDs has a very ‘analog’ appearance about it. And it was obviously cumulative.
What’s the cause of the sound that the PCB makes as it boots up? Is it capacitors being charged up? Or something else?
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It’s the coils in the stepper motors. If the stepper motors aren’t plugged in it shouldn’t make any noise
I’m assuming that’s the Z-Axis steppers then?
I have everything plugged in, because I want it all to successfully boot up.
So my question is why would changing the cables that connect to the hall effect sensors for each arm have an impact on the charge up / boot up process?
Looking for clues more than answers, so I can diagnose what I’m doing wrong with the cables.
There are a couple of reasons that it could change things. If you see a red flashing light it could be because the machine does a self check during the boot up sequence and it’s detecting that something is wrong.
It could be a power issue, if one of the cables is say a crossover cable it could be connecting power and ground to pins on the encoders that aren’t meant to have power and ground which could lead to unpredictable behavior.
It could also be an intermittent data connection to the encoders. A the SPI system will pause and wait if a transmission is interrupted which can lead to it messing with other code execution or even the processor crashing and restarting.
The first thing that I would check is that the pinout on the cables seems to match the ones that come standard in the kit. Having a wire crossed somewhere could for sure lead to some strange behavior.