I’m seeing seemingly random errors in my AltMill 4x4 which mostly works normally. I see occasional errors where gSender stops with an E-Stop asserted error (or whatever that text is, I believe like error 14) when I’ve been nowhere near the e-stop. I see it happen when the machine is moving from home via a macro to the front left corner, it will move several inches then just stop with the error, when I haven’t been anywhere near the front panel where the e-stop is. Any thoughts on this?
For the most part all my jobs run just fine, I can zero with the touch plate, it’s just every once in a while moving the machine around it’ll throw this error out and then I have to reset the e-stop by pushing it in and rotating, before gSender will let me clear the error, on the front panel the lights all look correct, not like the stop was tripped at all
I had the same issue and I think it came down to poor alignment of the ball screw pillow blocks with the bearins. After much trial and error I have now eliminated most of the clicking sound and it’s as smooth as it’s going to get. I get far less random errors when jogging manually, never had the issue during a job.
What are the ball screw pillow blocks? how would I get those aligned, I’,m not finding that phrase in the instructions (typing pillow into search gives me nothing) I imagine they’re something to do with the part that rides on the y axis underneath the plate, how does one get to those to adjust without taking it all back apart?
The pillow blocks as I understand are also known as bearing blocks and are what the ball screws attach to. Disclaimer that I am not an expert with these machines and whatever guidance I provide should be used at your own risk. But what had worked for me was to loosen one bearing block slightly and slowly jog the machine away from the bearing block and then jog it slowly back to the bearing block. Then the bearing block should be tightened back down. The idea is that you let the machine center the ball screw by jogging letting it find its center. You want to do the block closest to the motor first and then do the floating block on the opposite end. My theory is many of these errors are due to slight misalignment. And to be clear my issue was that it threw motor errors and required me to unlock the machine seemingly at random while jogging the machine around. I think mine was binding.
On a real big boy CNC they don’t make any of these clicking sounds and the ones I’ve heard are super smooth. I think it’s just the nature of the beast given that this CNC costs $4000 instead of $25,000 or $50,000.
Okay so still not quite clear, but getting there. There are now two different things in my brain that could be the pillows you speak of either the things on the screw that the gantry plates attach too and ,over the entire gantry back and forth or the blocks on either end that support the ball screw, which is what I’m thinking you mean as the screw goes through one to connect to the motor and the one at the front end supports the other side of the long screw
Yea each ball screw has a pillow/bearing block at each end with a bearing in it. Those black blocks that are at each end of the ball screw are the pillow blocks. Those are what I had adjusted to get rid of a good amount of the binding noises I heard and the motor errors haven’t occurred in some time now.