CRD, somewhere along the line Chris or Andy indicated the wire should be 18 ga. Thatās what I used when I made up the Z extension cable and everything has worked fine - no missed steps, no overheating, etc. I used butt connectors, although depending on where you make you cut they can be in the way, so I would probably solder them next time. I included extra wires in both drag chains for limit switches and I will solder them.
Tks, Bill. Rather than make extensions, if I do anything, Iāll replace the existing cables with longer shielded cable.
Just surfaced my Longmill wasteboard. Dry run went good. Live run attempt #1 it crapped out about 5 rows in. Just stopped. No error or anything in UGS. I have vid of this.
I disconnected and re-connected and restarted and it completed attempt #2 with no issues.
There seems to be a glitch in the matrix.
This is what happens to me. One time a job will run; another time, the same job freezes.
Would you send the video to Andy, please, Lumpy. I canāt say that my freezes are caused by the same issue, but this may be a good start in diagnosing all of our freezes.
Well Greg, weāll have to agree to disagree. Motors are electromagnets. They are made of steel with windings of wire. The thousands of pulses going to the motors is a great source of EMI. The router uses a universal motor which can be noisy, especially if there is a lot of arcing at the brushes but the stepper motors need to be considered as well. That is just a fact! I wonāt tell you what is permissible to talk about and I would appreciate the same consideration.
How about this if you are having problems
Something is causing something to crap out. Definitely not an isolated issue.
Telling someone not to discuss something seems rather rude and non-constructive.
How do we know for sure that something from Beta to production hasnāt changed
and is now causing problems???
Nothing wrong with community members trying to help each other out to overcome
this issue. Be a part of the solution not part of the problem.
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@Lumpy @gwilki I am having the same issue myself. Installed my wasteboard yesterday and attempted to surface it at my first ābigā project with the CNC. I have my control board mounted to the underside of the table, directly under where the cables exit the drag chain.
First run went well. No issues, but there was a dip in the middle so I needed to run it again. Started #2 and it made it halfway before it stopped. All I could surmise was that my USB must have wiggled loose (the supplied cable isnāt a tight fit in my computer) as it said āDisconnected.ā
Long story short it took me 5 tries before I was able to surface the entire waste board without a problem.
@Br5d funny you mention dmg to the router cable. I noticed a bunch of black shaving near the exit of the drag chain on the left side of the machine. Upon closer inspection I found that the router cable has already begun to wear away from friction on what Iām assuming is the drag chain.
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My controller box is mounted under my bench as well. I will check my router cable for chaffing tomorrow.
Guys, when your machine stops mid cycle what exactly do you have to do to get it to run again? That may offer a clue to whatās going on.
BillKorn
18AWG makes much more sense. I thought I saw 22AWG somewhere but I could easily be mistaken.
I had to disconnect and reconnect within UGS. It was completely non-responsive. I then had to reset my zeros.
Same as what lumpy said. Nobody was around the table at the time that could have bumped the loose USB cable
In my case, all my cables are tight.
My controller is on the left side of the Mill, on the top of the table, running parallel to the Y axis of the Mill. The Z axis cable was too short to put it anywhere else. I did not extend the Z axis cable.
I have had three different situations when it freezes. One where the run, pause and stop buttons are all greyed out, but I can jog the Mill manually. It will not āreturn to zeroā as it has lost its place. The second one, all the buttons are greyed out and I cannot jog or do anything. I can close UGS and restart. The third one, all is frozen. I canāt even close UGS. I need to use task manager to close it down. Of course, it has lost everything then.
All of us with this problem need to take a screen cap of UGS when the Mill freezes and before we do anything else. Send this screen cap to Andy. This is what he asked me to do. It seems that until at least one of us can do that, nothing will be done to fix it.
Well, it froze again this afternoon and I got 2 screen caps, which I just sent to Andy.
The freeze came early in a big file. Iāve had it freeze on this file before and Iāve had it run fine before, too. It ran fine this afternoon after the freeze.
I hope that Iāll hear something from Andy soon.
CRD: I had to do an unlock, then I could run it again. It had lost its starting point, so I had to reset that. I was running with no bit in the router, so lost nothing this time.
Hey guys. I got the screenshots which helps a lot because I can see it is an āALARM 3ā. This is from when the āStopā button is triggered. We fixed this issue in the boards by adding 10uF capacitors across each switch to filter noise and found that it stopped all the interference that would trigger it. You can read about it in our 10th Kickstarter update (https://sienci.com/2019/10/23/kickstarter-progress-update-10/)
We found that most similar boards in this application have some sort of capacitor to filter noise and we have integrated them into all of our boards going forward.
We hand soldered all of the capacitors onto the boards to fix this issue, but there is a chance that we may have not had a good connection for the capacitor. if you are having problems with the machine stopping and seeing an ALARM 3 issue, please get in touch with me and we can help you fix the issue.
Thanks much for getting onto this so quickly, Andy.
Hi Andy
Itās great that you have a solution. I was wondering if some people may have the lash adjuster over tightened and/or have a slight misalignment of the rails causing excess drag. The system may seem to function normally but stalls when the feed rate is too high or during rapids. The motor(s) may stall from lack of torque.
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Hi CRD,
We did design the machine in mind that some machines may have overtightened parts or misalignment. If because of that the machine is stalling we can help users on a case by case basis, but as far as I have seen, there have only been a couple of people who needed to realign their machine which doesnāt take that long.
When the machine is moving rapids/high feed rates, it is most prone to losing steps. The default settings have worked well for us, however we do go into further discussion here: Fixing the X-axis Torque-out issues
Best,
Andy
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