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Author Topic: Motors not turning, freaking out considerably  (Read 1701 times)

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Motors not turning, freaking out considerably
« on: February 08, 2015, 03:33:03 PM »
Already posted in smoothstepper forum but wanted to see if anyone else might have insight because I believe it is not a smoothstepper issue.

I just setup my fireball v90 for the first time and so far there is no movement or sound from any motors so I freaked out for 2 hours last night.

I am trying to run mach3 through a smoothstepper using windows 7 with pbx-rf board. I am using the newest drivers and plugins. I believe ports/pins are set correctly, except e stop is set to port 1 pin 15 active low? Is that correct to fake an e stop? Anyhow I have no trouble jogging the DRO but nothing happens to the motors. No sounds or vibration of anything. Motor tuned to inches, 1000 steps/in, 20 velocity, 4 accel, 5/5 pulse.

I have not had a chance to check if the motors are powered by seeing if I can manually move them with machine on though.

Another concern, I did not use the included usb connector on the ready to run enclosure because I didn't remember and didn't think it was necessary. I have read that it is not needed, however the enclosure fan was never running, is this powered by USB or is it faulty?

Diagnostics on mach3 only showed enable 1 2 3 as red. No lights on port 1 pins or anywhere else. It also told me "external" for pulse frequency which I assume is normal for smoothsteppers.

Lastly, my first time switching on the enclosure I heard a small pop sound right away. A few minutes later I also heard it again. This was when nothing was happening on the machine and not even attempting to jog or send code.

Anyone have any clue on how to help me? I would like to hope it's a simple error on my part but can't seem to figure out where that could be aside from the USB cable. I really hope I don't have to RMA the enclosure.

One last thought, I am using the db25 cables from both the enclosure and the one from warp9td for the smoothstepper but required a low profile female/female gender change in between. Could the problem be this small?

Thanks for any insight! I'm gonna have an ulcer.
Re: Motors not turning, freaking out considerably
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2015, 08:44:54 PM »
Anytime you hear a popping sound coming from an electrical control panel is not a good sign. This combined with no motor movement tells me it's time to send back the unit to Fireball.   

Just for future reference... using a Smoothstepper the pulse width in Mach isn't used so setting it to 5/5 has no affect. The same with Mach kernel frequency rate.... it should be set for 25kh when using a smooth stepper. Setting it higher has no affect on the smooth stepper and just wastes PC cpu resources. 
« Last Edit: February 08, 2015, 08:51:30 PM by geh7552 »