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General Mach Discussion / Z axis values changing, stepper not moving
« on: January 05, 2014, 10:50:10 PM »
Hi all,
I'm back with another problem! I've managed to get hold of a PC that doesn't make my steppers clunk and things are mostly going ok.
The major problem now appears to be the z axis stepper skipping steps. It's now happened 7 times in random spots while running the same Gcode and I've been getting weird side effects in Mach3 afterwards. For 3 of the attempts, I immediately hit the RESET button and jogged the z-axis. However, jogging doesn't work... the Z coordinates are changing on the main Mach screen but the stepper doesn't move. For the other 4 times, the jog button works but my auto zeroing tool doesn't. The failing Gcode in the auto-zero tool is G31 Z-3 F20. In addition to that, G0 and G1 don't move the steppers either. In all cases, the Z coordinates change in the Mach3 GUI.
From reading through this forum, I think the coordinates in Mach3 are called DRO? I'm not sure if that's correct because I don't know what DRO even stands for.
If it's at all helpful, I'm getting strange scratching/screeching noises from any stepper motor plugged into the controller board's Z axis. I'm using a Gecko 540 and I'm in contact with those guys seeing if it's something worth investigating. In the mean time, I was thinking of re-configuring my cnc to use a different physical stepper controller for the Z axis but wasn't sure if it's possible. My machine has 2 steppers for the long X axis setup in slave mode with the stepper controller labelled A being the slave controller. I can easily disconnect that second X axis ballscrew/stepper (A axis) from the Y axis and only drive the X axis using the one stepper (the driving ballscrew wouldn't be centred though, it's to the left of the machine). I would then use the stepper controller labelled A as the new Z axis. This would eliminate the Z axis controller and I could test the same Gcode and see what happens. I'm just not 100% sure how to do it.
Thanks for reading, hopefully someone can make sense of it all.
I'm back with another problem! I've managed to get hold of a PC that doesn't make my steppers clunk and things are mostly going ok.
The major problem now appears to be the z axis stepper skipping steps. It's now happened 7 times in random spots while running the same Gcode and I've been getting weird side effects in Mach3 afterwards. For 3 of the attempts, I immediately hit the RESET button and jogged the z-axis. However, jogging doesn't work... the Z coordinates are changing on the main Mach screen but the stepper doesn't move. For the other 4 times, the jog button works but my auto zeroing tool doesn't. The failing Gcode in the auto-zero tool is G31 Z-3 F20. In addition to that, G0 and G1 don't move the steppers either. In all cases, the Z coordinates change in the Mach3 GUI.
From reading through this forum, I think the coordinates in Mach3 are called DRO? I'm not sure if that's correct because I don't know what DRO even stands for.
If it's at all helpful, I'm getting strange scratching/screeching noises from any stepper motor plugged into the controller board's Z axis. I'm using a Gecko 540 and I'm in contact with those guys seeing if it's something worth investigating. In the mean time, I was thinking of re-configuring my cnc to use a different physical stepper controller for the Z axis but wasn't sure if it's possible. My machine has 2 steppers for the long X axis setup in slave mode with the stepper controller labelled A being the slave controller. I can easily disconnect that second X axis ballscrew/stepper (A axis) from the Y axis and only drive the X axis using the one stepper (the driving ballscrew wouldn't be centred though, it's to the left of the machine). I would then use the stepper controller labelled A as the new Z axis. This would eliminate the Z axis controller and I could test the same Gcode and see what happens. I'm just not 100% sure how to do it.
Thanks for reading, hopefully someone can make sense of it all.