Our makerspace purchased an X-Carve Pro several months ago. Until recently, it has worked great with Easel, gSender and OpenBuilds Control. A week ago, both gSender and OpenBuilds Contol lost communication with the X-Carve controller. gSender will connect to the controller on the Com port (9), but the communication won’t take place. So, I can’t home or jog the machine. OpenBuilds Control won’t connect at all. Easel still works fine.
After talking with Inventables support, I reloaded the firmware using the Arduino IDE, but it still won’t work with the other g-code sender apps. I even connected a different Windows PC in the event there was a hardware issue with the USB/Comm interface. No luck.
The only thing I haven’t done is replace the USB cables or put ferrite chokes on both ends of the USB cables. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any thoughts or suggestions on why this would quit working after months of use?
Things break for various reasons. It’s mostly a tipping point that can cascade into total darkness. The art of finding the most likely culprits is to sit and investigate, ask questions to yourself or/and other people who work with the device. Create a check-list based on the data gathered to identify the most likely points of interest.
So your device suddenly stopped working, the first question here is, what changed? Have you updated software? Maybe some settings in the newer version got changed.
Updates. (A yes here is a red cross.)
What is still working? Well you say gsender can still connect and that you reloaded firmware on the arduino, so that side still works. The arduino gets its power from the usb connection so if you can flash it, it is prolly fine. The other side of the controller might have lost power though. Firstly without using a screw driver.
Power supply controller
Power supply connection socket
Power supply connection device
Power switch
Fuse that can be reached from the outside of the device.
Shaketest
Smelltest (Burned electronics give of a caracteristic smell, sharp but somehow sweet and strangely satisfyingly. It’s like waking up to the smell of coffee on a saturday morning while a spring sunrise lights up your curtains, prommising a wonderfull day…)
Where was I… To make sure you are not going to open up a perfectly working unit, it’s a good idea to have a known-good-usb cable and use this cable to check off the cable as not being the problem.
know good usb cable test.
If you have walked through this first checklist and you still need help, check back and we’ll see how to proceed from here, with the information gathered.
@capelenglish Without taking anything away from @Spamming_Eddie advice, I would be skeptical about this being a hardware issue since you say that Easel still works fine. Assuming that you are connecting with the same hardware as you are using for gSender and OpenBuilds, I would conclude that the hardware components- controller, arduino, cable - are all fine.
As @Spamming_Eddie said, then, you need to look at what changed since your machine operated using these applications. Have you updated gSender, for example? If you have, it may be a good idea to uninstall it and go back to a previous version. If you choose to do that, be sure to rename the .sender_rc file. Failing to do that will mean that the new install will use the same configuration as the current one.
@gwilki, I agree that it doesn’t appear to be a hardware issue since Easel works fine. The X-Carve Pro has both USB and an ethernet cable between the box that contains the E-Stop and the Arduino controller. There is another USB cable between this box and the PC. I’m guessing that the Easel driver uses the ethernet interface instead of the USB cable.
Since this machine is in a makerspace, I can’t be sure that someone didn’t change something since I’m not the only user. However, no one has stated that they made a change and I’m one of the few people who use Vcarve/gSender. Almost everyone else uses Easel.
Thinking that it may have been the PC, I swapped out the PC with a newer one (Win10). On it, I loaded the latest version of gSender and OpenBuilds Control. BTW, since the machine is so new, the same/latest version of both apps were installed on the old and the new PC. The problem still exists so I concluded it’s not the PC.
I assembled the X-Carve Pro when it came in back in August and I’ve checked all the cable connections – twice. The one thing I haven’t done is add ferrite chokes to the USB cables or replace them. It’s the next think I’m going to try.
Inventables support said:
In the past the baudrate adjustment has allowed users to connect to Openbuilds. Unfortunatley, that is as far as I can help with getting your X-Carve Pro connected to another software since we do not technically support them.
Since everything worked fine prior this happening, I’ve not tried adjusting the baud rate (115200). My question is what baud rate to try? (lower I assume) I’ll try that after replacing the USB cables.
@capelenglish I know nothing about the XCarve machines. I just read the setup for your machine, and it did not expand on my knowledge much. It has a passing reference to the ethernet cable, but it says that the connection between the PC and the machine is by USB. So, I don’t understand how Easel could be connecting via the ethernet cable. You will know more about this than I do.
You may want to post your issue on the XCarve forum. It’s likely others have run into this and may be able to provide advice. I’m sorry, but I can’t take this any further.
@capelenglish I forgot to address your question on baud rate. Way back when I was having disconnect issues, I played with baud rates to address them. I had read that there was some evidence that high baud rates could be problematic with noise. I knocked mine down to 57600 - so half . The disconnects stopped, but the results were not conclusive as I had foolishly changed several things at the same time. So, I could not definitively say that the baud rate reduction was the solution.
My problem was different from yours. I was able to connect and run files. I simply had disconnects.
It cannot hurt to try, but I would not be optimistic. It all comes back to “what changed”? Clearly, the baud rate did not.
If I were you, I would start by uninstalling gSender 1.4.11. Rename the config file - .sender_rc. Then install whatever version of gSender that was working for you. You lose nothing but your time.
Good luck.
First thing I did today was put some ferrite chokes on the USB cable and it didn’t solve the problem. Then, I dropped the baud rate to 57600 and gSender began communicating with the X-Carve Pro controller. While I didn’t run any gcode, I think this has solved my problem.
