I’ve been trying to get a valid calibration, and decided I needed to brace the frame. However, after I finished, the belts wouldn’t retract. The Maslow has a flashing red light and no commands work.
The test message said unable to connect to the top right motor, so I swapped the tr and tl motor inputs, and still only had the tr error.
After removing the heat sink closest to it, I got the same message. I couldn’t find any other ideas on the forums.
It looks like someone happened to the controller… Any other ideas for correcting the issue? I’m attaching a picture of the whole board; the only one I took has One of the motors unattached and another swapped.
Hi Alex,
Your idea to locate the problem by switching the motors is a good one, but I think you might have done it the wrong way around.
When I look at the picture, it looks to me (if I have the orientation right) that you uncoupled both tr and tl, but instead of testing the tr on the board, with the tl motor, I think you did it the other way around. To me it seems, on the picture, it shows the tr (on the board) empty and the tr motor cable hooked up to the lt on the board. So it would be logical in that configuration that the right connection on the board still gives the same error because there is nothing connected.
This should mean the right motor was good, or at least it connects ok to the left top board connection.
To test it more you should also connect the tl motor in the tr board and test for errors.
And also do it the other way around test just the top left motor cable in the top right board connection, to see if the board connector works with another motor in it.
Success with it! Hope this helps.
I unplugged and reconnected all the Ethernet cables, but didn’t try swapping them. I assumed that the Ethernet cables would give a magnet error. I’ll try that later today.
And I did completely swap the motor connectors… I just didn’t take a picture of that step. The top right still showed no connection.
I searched for this thread because I was having a similar issue. My top right motor worked good during setup and calibration but has slowly started to get worse. I had issues with the motor faulting or exceeding 4000. I tightened everything and cleaned it of all sawdust. I changed outlets and then tried a test run without powering on the router (some have mentioned EMI issues). In the last attempt, I still got the fault but I noticed the movement of the TR motor was jerky almost like it was connecting and disconnecting. I rebooted and the motor would not retract the belt completely. I rebooted again and it did not work at all. The encoder light pulses when pushing the belt around. I removed the board and brought it back to the house to look at the solder joints and they look fine. I found this thread and wonder if I have the same issue. Any new suggestions???
I think that the first step is to check how it performs with repeated extend and retract cycles. Ignoring the other arms if you just extend and retract that arm a few times how does it feel?
Well, I put it all back together and nothing seems odd about the extension and retraction at all. I tried again to run a project but this time I get an error because my zero is off by more than 15mm. I am more than a little frustrated with this system. I did realize there would be some trial and error but I have nothing to show for months of fiddling. Retract, Extend, Error, Off, On…repeat…over and over and over again. I guess I now need to clear the spoil board and calibrate once again. I will need to do that just to revisit the motor error. I will reply when I get back to that point.
Yeah, we’re definitely still in our 3D printer circa 2009 era. I also can’t wait to get to the point where everything just works smoothly, but the only way to get there is one step at a time.
This might indicate that there is something funky going on with your calibration.
Just to make sure that it’s not a hardware issue let’s try running Retract All → Extend All → Retract All and see what the values that get printed out are. They should be close to zero which will tell us that there isn’t something funky going on with the hardware.
Bar, thank you. I did try the Retract and Extend…three times. The easiest way for me to get the values down while in my workshop is to just take pictures but since they take up space, I will attempt to summarize. The first time I did it, the offsets were:
BR -1410.872
TL -1409.304
TR -1397.808
BL -1440.600
All the belts pulled tight and I re-extended
The second retraction values were:
TR 224.749
TL -0.043
BL 0.150
BR -2.072
And you can tell from these values that the TR had not retracted all the way. About 10 inches were left dangling.
So, I tried extending and retracting again. The third retraction values were:
TR 1403.689
TL 0.032
BL 0.000
BR 0.730
The top right is still completely extended and not retracting at all.
I did not observe anything that felt different in the TR extension. The belt is straight and clean. This happened once before but I did the extend and retract a few more times and it worked.
The board connector seems loose to me but wiggling it makes no difference in the retraction step. What do you think?
These other three look OK although that BR seems to maybe be a little bit high. 0.7 and -2.0 both seem like maybe that magnet is slipping. If the magnet isn’t glued firmly in place it can rotate separately from the roller which is on the belt resulting in an inaccurate reading on the belt length
I did not realize we were talking about the retraction force (force and current don’t seem synonymous to me). I did increase the force when the maslow was first assembled to get the initial motors to retract. I also had issues with the higher force so I completely disassembled the unit to check the magnet and the encoder (per another post with a similar issue). Both were just as they should be so I reassembled and started from scratch. I found that upon reassembly everything seemed to work for a retraction force of 1300.
So, I am certain that my magnet and gears are exactly as they should be. I will try bumping up the retraction force again and see what happens. Thank you,
-David
Ok, I bumped up to 1500 and the TL motor retracted. I cycled this a couple times to make sure it was repeatable and then calibrated everything again. Here is the end of the serial file with the completed calibration numbers.
Calibration complete
Calibration values:
Fitness: 0.7062780847066145
Maslow_tlX: 5.0
Maslow_tlY: 1843.4
Maslow_trX: 2497.4
Maslow_trY: 1842.8
Maslow_blX: 0.0
Maslow_blY: 0.0
Maslow_brX: 2495.4
Maslow_brY: 0.0
A command to save these values has been successfully sent for you. Please check for any error messages.
error:82
[MSG:INFO: Zeroing z-axis position]
[MSG:INFO: Calibration complete]
