Push to extend bug?

Troubleshooting
1

After a successful day cutting 2 full sheets of parts yesterday I loaded up a new sheet this morning , attached the belts, and hit apply tension. Maslow pulled BL and TR so tight I thought it was going to snap. Errored with the usual exceed 4000ma current exceeded.

Powered off machine, retracted belts, and then went to extend.

TL and TR are both doing the thing where you can “push” the belt in and it’ll let you pull that distance out that I’ve documented before at Extend all failing to release all belts

Any ideas?

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If it doesn’t clear the issue with a restart, I’d try replacing your yaml/index and firmware with the most recent. Bar had mentioned that this could be related to the yaml file.

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Just did that with the same result. Usually that has fixed it in the past though.

It’s almost as if the motor is running or the encoder is reading backwards? So that as I push the belt in it powers that much out. Some sort of race condition?

I don’t think it could be hardware related as it’s sporadic in nature and I’ve had it cutting for just over 10 hours already.

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I swapped TL and BL encoder and motor ports on the controller , the problem stayed with TL so its got to be something to do with that encoder/motor?

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5

That is weird. Good sleuthing to track it down. I’m a little stumped.

Does pressing test report anything out of the ordinary?

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6

Im having the same issue botom left :thinking:

IMG_5746
IMG_57461284×2778 268 KB

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Does anyone have a video of it happening? I’m still not 100% sure I can picture it right

8

Gosh @bar I just unplugged for a minute this time, started over with retract then extend and working fine :man_shrugging:

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In that video is it extending on the push or on the pull?

If you push in and then extend slowly does it extend normally?

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It extends on the push. You push it say 10mm , it’ll roll out 10mm more. then the next time you can push 20mm , and it’ll let out another 20mm. Eventually you can do this until all 4300mm are out (ive done this a few times) . Retract all works fine.

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I’m trying to picture this and I’m confusing myself. So the issue was happening on the top left arm…then when swapping the TL and BL encoder and motor ports the issue stayed with the same arm or stayed with the same port on the controller board?

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Stayed with same arm

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That’s got to be an issue with the encoder then. If you unplug the cable on the encoder side and plug it back in does that change anything?

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Nope. I have previously fixed it with some combination of firmware upgrade / replacing the config or just rebooting. Its an odd one…

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Super odd.

That the issue moves with the arm (great call on doing that test) points strongly to it being something with the encoder board, but having a firmware upgrade fix it points to it being a software thing.

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Yup and it’s really odd that if it’s the encoder board how have I been able to cut ~10hrs without issue.

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18

Just a thought, did you try swapping the Ethernet cables to see if it was a cable issue?

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Will try that this morning!

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That’s why I was wondering if it was the wire. I was thinking maybe it came lose or something.

I don’t think that the encoder board failed, they’re good for a long long time usually and since a couple folks are seeing this I don’t think it’s a one off fluke.

I just took a look at the code and you should be seeing an encoder read failure message if the board is experiencing a bad connection to the encoder