Another Day, Another Issue

[jkendall]

Happy Saturday to you Gents!

I had an issue this past week where it was determined that the Y-axis direction pin on the Arduino that came with this machine has chooched its last.

No biggie! Arduinos are cheap and flashing with the provided hex file was a snap.

Then I ran into yet another issue where the thing had a mind of it's own. A quick check of "$$" revealed that it did, in fact lose it's mind. I threw in a backup of the settings gotten during troubleshooting of a previous issue:

$0=10 (step pulse, usec)
$1=255 (step idle delay, msec)
$2=0 (step port invert mask:00000000)
$3=0 (dir port invert mask:00000000)
$4=0 (step enable invert, bool)
$5=0 (limit pins invert, bool)
$6=0 (probe pin invert, bool)
$10=3 (status report mask:00000011)
$11=0.010 (junction deviation, mm)
$12=0.002 (arc tolerance, mm)
$13=0 (report inches, bool)
$20=0 (soft limits, bool)
$21=0 (hard limits, bool)
$22=1 (homing cycle, bool)
$23=0 (homing dir invert mask:00000000)
$24=25.000 (homing feed, mm/min)
$25=600.000 (homing seek, mm/min)
$26=244 (homing debounce, msec)
$27=4.000 (homing pull-off, mm)
$100=40.000 (x, step/mm)
$101=40.000 (y, step/mm)
$102=80.000 (z, step/mm)
$110=8000.000 (x max rate, mm/min)
$111=8000.000 (y max rate, mm/min)
$112=3000.000 (z max rate, mm/min)
$120=250.000 (x accel, mm/sec^2)
$121=250.000 (y accel, mm/sec^2)
$122=250.000 (z accel, mm/sec^2)
$130=264.000 (x max travel, mm)
$131=264.000 (y max travel, mm)
$132=69.000 (z max travel, mm)

The only issue I'm running into now is that it's not minding the homing switches. I checked switch and wire continuity with my multimeter and everything looks good. What else should I look at to ensure my z-axis doesn't try to shoot for the moon?


-JK

[Derek the Admin]

If your $$ settings are getting changed then something is resetting them. Are you using Easel by chance? There are certain things in Easel that will reflash your board and overwrite settings.

How do you have the homing switches plugged in? Also, which firmware version did you select? The Laser/Spindle/PWM version reassigns Z homing to "Sp En" (spindle enable) in order to enable onboard hardware pulse width modulation to control lasers and software controlled spindles.

Just curious how you determined the pulse pin was dead on the Uno board. That would be a pretty rare failure. It would be more likely that a driver burned. I'm sure you did diagnostics to determine that, I'm just curious about it since that's one I haven't seen.

Anyway, let me know about those questions and we will see what we can do to help.

[jkendall]

Mar 18, 2017 16:58:22 GMT Derek the Admin said:

If your $$ settings are getting changed then something is resetting them. Are you using Easel by chance? There are certain things in Easel that will reflash your board and overwrite settings.

How do you have the homing switches plugged in? Also, which firmware version did you select? The Laser/Spindle/PWM version reassigns Z homing to "Sp En" (spindle enable) in order to enable onboard hardware pulse width modulation to control lasers and software controlled spindles.

Just curious how you determined the pulse pin was dead on the Uno board. That would be a pretty rare failure. It would be more likely that a driver burned. I'm sure you did diagnostics to determine that, I'm just curious about it since that's one I haven't seen.

Anyway, let me know about those questions and we will see what we can do to help.

Well, I have success. It was a bum flash. I flashed with the non-homing switch hex file. My fault. I just had a successful homing cycle.

To determine whether the pin was dead or not, I wiped the Arduino and in the IDE, set all the pins to digital (the default) and one-by-one hooked them up to an LED array. The program cycled through the pins at a rate of one per second putting the pins high. I wasn't getting anything out of pin 6. It's happened to me before when I was doing experiments with MIDI and Arduino. Pins just fail. Yes it is rare, but it still happens.