Makerverse no z axis movement at all

I recently downloaded webcontrol and have the right and left motors dialed in. But z motor does not turn and when I try to turn it the right motor moves the sled. I have an old Arduino with the two heat syncs on it. I’ve spent 10 hour yesterday and have no idea what to do.

In your “about” box for webcontrol, what version does it say you are running and what version of firmware are you running? Did you update your firmware from webcontrol? Did you import your groundcontrol.ini file into webcontrol?

You have a version 1.2 shield? With the L298 chips?

Says I’m running version .94 I haven’t imported anything the webcontrol connects fine and runs the other 2 motors. Ground control works those motors too but neither moves the z motor. The board makes lots of noise but no movement and the motor is not attached to the worm gear so it’s not seizing or anything. I bought my Maslow 3 years ago but am not sure which Arduino it is. The shield has 2 heat towers and the left motor and z motor plugs are right next to one another in the middle of the board.

If neither groundcontrol or webcontrol move the z axis, is the z axis checkbox enabled in the settings?

If yes, is the z axis pitch set at 3.17 (if you are using the rigid base)?

It is a rigid base. Where do I find the z axis is enabled? Every time I try to move the z axis it gives me a pop up to “readjust” the axis by the amount of how much I wanna change it. Don’t know if that matters or now. I’m really appreciating the help thank you.

it is in the settings menu. Scroll through until you see z axis. What you describe makes it sound like the z axis is disabled.

Sure enough the “x-axis installed” switch was not toggled on! I will test it when I get home. Thank you very much I feel really dumb. Weird it didn’t work for ground control or webcontrol

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If I remember correctly, I believe that was also a setting in GC that needed to be toggled on as well. When the kits were first sold, there wasn’t a z-axis motor, and then I want to say circa '18 was when they were added, and someone put that in to allow those that had the motors to enable the control on the z-axis. Otherwise, you had to manually adjust the z-height like you would do with a normal router.

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That’s so odd. Ive used my maslow a few times with ground control and always had success with the z axis. My board did slip out so I wonder if that setting was switched off during the disconnection until I fixed everything. Strange strange

the first version of the maslow didn’t have a motorized Z axis by default (it
was a $60
add-on), the machine would pause to let you manually adjust the Z. This worked
for very simple things, but the automated Z greatly enhanced the machine, but
this legacy means that there is an option to enable Z and it’s too easy for it
to end up off.

David Lang

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Z axis works great now thank you … However… Now when I try to move the sled down 4 inches it moves up slightly and I’m told, “sled is not keeping up” I have changed those parameters folks talk about in the forum from 2.0 to 20 but still no luck

Sled is moving wrong direction and stalling out. Any more advice?

sled moving wrong direction says that you probably gave it the wrong information
when it asked what direction the chain is wrapped around the sprockets (top feed
vs bottom feed)

but the machine can’t detect that, so it would cause other problems.

try lowering the feedrate.

David Lang

And try upping the sled not keeping up number from 2 to 20 in the settings.

I changed that number to 200 and it didn’t help. Also my chain feed is set to the bottom of the sprocket. Where can I change the federate settings and what should it be? The animation in webcontrol goes very fast and obviously the sled doesn’t keep up but that 2.0-20 number hasn’t helped it.

Motor number 1 is the left motor. You either have them plugged in left to right or over under is selected wrong.

Turn down your default feed rate as dlang mentioned.

Dropped the federate to 600 and everything ran fine, on a whim I ran it but up to 800 and it’s running fine. The sled is not to fast anymore. No idea what dropping it and raising it again helped but it did. Thank folks!

the feed rate is set in the CAM stage of processing. In WebControl there should
be a setting for you max feed rate (overrides whatever is in the gcode)

David Lang

The problem is that “z axis Kp Pos” is set to 0 by default. It should be 1300.

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Just wanted to +1 this answer. I have just migrated an old V1 M2 shield and Mega machine to Makerverse with firmware holey 51.29 and didn’t have any Z movement. Could hear all motors doing the PWM braking and Z motor was TOK when swapped out with another axis. Ended up finding this little 1-line gem at the bottom of this thread - gave it a try and boom, back up and running! :slight_smile: Not sure where you figured it out, but thanks heaps rspeed for posting here

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