New M3 motors won't operate

[mikez]

I just completed the assembly of my M3. When I got the the testing part I discovered none of the stepper motors will run. Everything else seems to be working. the leds on the Uno board light up and flash. The fan runs with 24 volts to the red board. I am using UGS classic which seems to be working fine. I cannot get UGS platform to work on my new Windows 10 Dell laptop. I think a lot of the problem with that has to do with my computer not liking JAVA 64bit. I have tried everything including 64 bit offline. I am quite happy using Classic. Everything seems to work in Classic. I even sent a Vcarve file to run and it runs the file and says complete when done. The stepper motors never move. UGS Classic shows com 3 is used. In the device manager I get unknown device on com 3 when I plug in the USB cable and it goes away when I unplug it. I hope this is enough information for someone to give me an idea what to do. Thanks.

[gatesbox]

Maybe post a screen shot of your UGS window after connecting to your board. I’ve been having a tough time with windows 10 myself. Did you download Arduino IDE? I’m a total newb but sharing some of your struggle. I’ve got my steppers humming but not quite moving yet.... best of luck!

[joebob296]

TO build on what gatesbox said, are your jog buttons greyed out? Or can you click on the jog buttons and see the output in UGS window? IS the right COM port selected?

[Derek the Admin]

If things work in classic it seems that there is communication with the uno board. Do you hear the motors click on when you power everything up? Have you set the stepper drivers to 0.6V?

[mikez]

Thanks for the quick replies. All 3 drivers were set to 6 volts down from the original about 15 volts. The motors have never made a sound. The jog buttons are not greyed out and I do see all the activity in the UGS window. Com 3 is the only port shown as available when the USB cord is plugged in. The Classic software comes alive when cord is plugged in and com 3 is selected. The only other thing plugged into the computer is the dongle for the wireless mouse. I did not download Arduino IDE, I thought that came installed on the UNO board. Do I need to download that software?

[gatesbox]

I’ll let the admins trouble shoot your problem, but if Arduino IDE did not download or is not on your PC it is a very valuable tool. It is one way to view your Grbl defaults and make changes, also should you need to upload the Grbl library it is necessary. A helpful tool to peek into the workings of your Uno...

[mikez]

Thanks gatesbox, I will do that. I have a lot to learn.

[mikez]

I am still trying to get the stepper motors to respond...no luck yet. What should I try next? Is there a gcode sender that is not JAVA based that might work that I can try? Thanks.

[Derek the Admin]

I'd suggest hitting support's email at [e-mail] and sending them in so we can see what's up.

[ttabbal]

For a sender that's not Java based, CNCjs is a web based setup that works well for me. It might be worth a go. You could also just connect to the serial terminal and type gcode commands in, but that's going to have a fair learning curve if you're not familiar with serial terminals.

If you have an old computer, you could try using that. Windows 10 has gotten a lot more picky with drivers and such, so it's harder to set things like this up on it than it was on older machines. A dedicated Linux machine is how I do it, but I'm much more "at home" with Linux than Windows. Though I can say for certain that Java works fine on Windows 10, as Java programming is my day job and the company uses Windows 10 64-bit machines.

Definitely contact support via email though, I'm sure they can get you sorted out. Just thought I'd offer a suggestion for another sender since you asked for it.

[mikez]

It turned out to be my problem. There was a loose power wire where it connected to the red board. I secured the wire and did a quick jog test and the motors worked! Thanks for your help.

[Derek the Admin]

Glad all is well.
Cheers
Derek

[mikez]

Thanks ttabbal, I have the M3 running on UGS Classic right now...just starting out. I will see how that goes and I may want to go with your suggestion depending on how things work out. Thanks again.

[rowiac]

Dec 8, 2018 22:08:39 GMT mikez said:

I am using UGS classic which seems to be working fine. I cannot get UGS platform to work on my new Windows 10 Dell laptop. I think a lot of the problem with that has to do with my computer not liking JAVA 64bit. I have tried everything including 64 bit offline.

If UGS Classic is working fine for you that's great, but I also found that UGS Platform 64-bit would not run on my Win10 laptop due to a Java version error of some kind. But the 32-bit version of UGS Platform runs fine for me on that system.

[mikez]

I tried multiple times to run UGS Platform on 32 bit JAVA but it won't open due to not finding JAVA 1.7 or later. When running Platform on 64 bit JAVA the platform would crash and could not be opened again. I went through that several times. Classic seems to be working well now. Thanks for your help.