Fired up my machine for the first time a few weeks ago. It all worked impressively out of the box, except for some minor squewing issues. I was truely impressed with the whole system. Then during jobs it started to throw errors where the motors werent keeping up with their expected positions. This problem happened more and more often until eventually this error wouldnt clear in the ground control software. Eeprom clear didn’t help.
Now it will pass the Left motor test, but not the Right motor or Z motor, and the Right motor makes a funny buzz sound like it’s missing steps. Swapped over the left and right motor cables and tried again. This causes the other (Left) motor to make the same sounds that the right motor did… this suggests to me it’s not the motors. Not sure if it’s related or not, but I could never get a solid state relay to stay on constantly using aux 1 to control the router - it pulsed on and off.
This suggests to me that it’s the maslow shield, the arduino, or the power supply is under current. My first thought is one of the motor driver IC’s has fried. Am I heading in the right direction here?
The standard maslow shield is out of stock so I have ordered the other type that is listed in the community garden to replace the standard one. This introduces another issue… can I add my own Aux1 somewhere to it?
But my main issue is, I’m hooked now. It’s a really clever machine, and I’m itching to get going again with it so if it is something else faulty that I haven’t considered I’d like to order a replacement for that sooner rather than later.
Your thoughts?
Welcome to the Forum!
While it can be the shield, if there was no obvious reason for a chip on the shield to burn, like a chain wrapped around the sprocket or a ‘pull tight’ that didn’t stop after 3 sec, then the shield should be fine.
I had at least 1 occasion where the built in ‘wipe eeprom’ did not work and one downloaded from the arduino forum did.
It is possible the soft- firmware is ‘hooked’, so it’s worth a try.
Check the screws securing the sprockets are tight on the flat side of the motor shafts.
Try the ‘test motors encoders’ without the chain attached
Try to set the ‘Position error limit’ to 20 in the Advanced settings
Thanks for giving me things to look at. The chain is off when I have run motors test.
Firmware and Ground Control versions are both 1.26
What you said made me then try to reupload the firmware. The arduino software won’t upload to the board at all. Even the standard Blink sketch doesn’t upload. So I think we are onto something.
Ok it wouldn’t reupload because I was trying to upload firmware through a usb extender. Now firmware reuploaded. Everything ver 1.26. Back to original symptoms.
Thinking this is solved now. A beefier arduino shield and new arduino mega has arrived through the post. 3d printed a case with fan, wired it all up…
Still the first motor passed the testing, not the second one. So I had to rethink things. The problem is with usb. Specifically, to reach the computer, I had an active usb extender. The connection drops out to the arduino pretty consistently during the second motor test. Removing this extender it now passes testing every time.
Won’t get to put the machine in full swing until i get a chance to relocate the computer but it seems back up and running.
Thanks for your input guys.
so it does point to the shield then