ESS Smoothstepper running 2 Chinese BOBs. New upgrade to Mach 4 and the ESS. I have 2 x Nema 34 Closed loop steppers on my Y gantry one per side. Setup as Mach 4 with "Y" and slaved "A" - or, like how the manual describes if I may have worded it correctly.

It doesn't seem to like it. The A axis lagging behind and catching up giving my gantry a twist and back. Strange the A also throws an encoder fault but keeps going. Both motors exactly the same settings driver/software. Just one takes longer to get moving and catches up hurting my gantry. Anyways I was wondering if anyone has seen this before I start hard troubleshooting.

Also - is this still the correct way to setup 2 Nemas on an axis like this gantry when they are closed loop in Mach 4?

Thanks

I may be the wrong guy to answer as I don't have any slave axes. but I seem to remember that Mach4/ESS does it differently than Mach3. You don't define an A axis and slave the two, you define a slave motor on the same axis.

Look here: https://warp9td.com/index.php/gettingstarted/setting-up-the-smoothstepper-and-mach4#MachAxisMapping

and look for Axis mapping.

Hi. Correct. Thats how i have done it. I was wondering if that way is the correct setup using closed loop steppers because the way they are acting is strange. Hmmm, I will take a better look at my hardware today and see if I have gotten something wrong.

But, you shouldn't have an A axis, just two motors assigned to Y, right? Shouldn't matter the type of motor, long as the motor is wired/setup correctly.

In the recent past I upgraded my Z axis from Nema 24 to 34. This placed the new Z larger driver in my cabinet at position #4. I swapped them out last week to make the order X, Y, Z, A from the top down. It appears the motors didnt like running with different drivers - not sure what the exact reason was I didnt troubleshoot any further as I fixed it by transposing the drivers. I have over the years purchased Nema upgrades from different suppliers. I do know the encoders are wired differently.

Anyways that has seemed to fix the issue I think. Everything moves now. The lag seems to have gone. I have attached my settings. I think they are correct and as for the ESS settings Motor 3 is only labeled A.

Gee tell you what, I have a 1200w switching power supply. On start, it drops out from the initial current draw of the 4 x Nema 34s and comes back online about 1sec later. I have not seen it do that before although its in a coltrol box I would not have seen. I have another 2 x 1500w 110vdc power supplies in the mail. I guess it was a good idea to purchase them. I thought I would need them as I am expecting the machine to such a bit more energy out of them with higher speeds. Ok. Back to the workshop.....