This has turned into a series of issues so I will start at the beginning. I loaded up the .73 firmware and re-ran the calibration. This was successful.
I issued a Z up command for 10 inches thinking it was mm. the machine indicated that the z axis was moving up but the machine was not moving. At the same time the bottom belts started extending all the way, they got all tangled but i was able to clear the belt tangle up.
I read that the .yaml file may have been the cause of the z-axis movement issue so I reloaded the file and restarted the machine via the command in FluidNC. At first I could not connect to the m4 so i looked and found the maslow wifi(i had it connected to my wifi before) when I connect it looks like i need to reload the firmware as the screen looks like a basic FluidNC prompt.
Sean Keehn wrote:
I issued a Z up command for 10 inches thinking it was mm. the machine
indicated that the z axis was moving up but the machine was not moving. At the
same time the bottom belts started extending all the way, they got all tangled
but i was able to clear the belt tangle up.
the machine takes into account the Z position to know how long the belts need to
be, so as you do the 10 inch Z movement, it will physically run off the top of
the threads and stop moving, but it doesn’t know that, so it will keep feeding
out the belts so they will still reach
now, if the machine was all the way down and didn’t move the Z, then yes,
rebooting and/or checking that the yaml file hasn’t gotten corrupted is a good
idea. Since that stores your settings, replacing it resets a bunch of stuff.
keep a known good copy around.
David Lang
I think this is an issue of not unlocking the machine. Clicking on the red “Alarm” box will unlock the machine and make it move up.
What the best way to go about resolving this issue? Reconnect with USB and reload the firmware. Looking at the screen initially it didn’t look like i have the option to update the firmware the normal way. I’ll get a screen shot when i get home from work.
So last night I worked through connection issues for about an hour. It seems the maslow does not like wifi range extenders, i tried 2. Either way the machine seems frozen in that it will not move when commands are sent. I think my next step is to reset everything manual while saving the maslow.yaml calibration data, also manually. For the z-axis is there a chance the drive force is set to low on my machine? when i try to drive the z the motor get very hot but it doesn’t move.
The z-axis uses stepper motors which don’t really have a drive force setting like the servo motors do. Are you able to rotate them by hand freely? It’s also possible for them to get off from one another so that one side is higher than the other which can lead to it being jammed
Right now both motors are fully down, i might need to remove the bottom screws to manually raise them.
Hmm that is tricky then, it’s tough to access those when it’s all the way down. At least we can rule out them being a different heights.
I still think something is mechanically jamming them, but it’s tough to say what
Ok, I’ll include disassembly as part of my troubleshooting and report back when i know more.
the other times we’ve seen the steppers getting hot, replacing the maslow.yaml
file with the default has fixed it (i.e. the yaml file has gotten corrupted so
the pins going to the steppers were being driven incorrectly)
David Lang
Great suggestion @dlang I bet that is the issue!
So… I updated to the latest firmware .74 last night. interestingly the icons for setup and Z did not change. I updated both the index.html(i manually input the calibration data).gz file and the maslow.yaml file along with the firmware.bin file. So all new files. Good news, the z-axis works and is not jammed. Bad news, the machine still doesn’t move. I issue commands to move the machine right 10inches and it doesn’t move, however the machine indicates a new position on the display. I have checked the alarm/lock/idle/jog is set to move the machine.
Any other ideas as to the issue?
This is 100% my fault. I uploaded the wrong index.html file 
. It should be fixed now.
This was going to be my first guess.
Are you able to extend and retract the belts?
I didn’t check that but will tonight, Is there anything I’m going to need to do every time I update the firmware, such as calibration, or retract all/extend all? I need a step(should just build one in) to reach the top anchors on my frame, which makes those operations annoying.
Sean Keehn wrote:
I didn’t check that but will tonight, Is there anything I’m going to need to
do every time I update the firmware, such as calibration, or retract
all/extend all? I need a step(should just build one in) to reach the top
anchors on my frame, which makes those operations annoying.
any time you reboot or turn off the machine you will need to do a retract-all to
let the machine find the belt lengths agains.
All that Calibration is doing is figuring out where the anchors are. Once you
have good numbers for that in your maslow.yaml file, you should not need to
calibrate again unless your frame changes.
David Lang