I took delivery of one of these about 1 week ago, the 6040Z+S80 New Version. It was purchased from carving-cnc.com
At first it ran wonderfully and without a hitch. The speeds were actually pretty impressive for 24 volts. However, not long after I started to run into some issues.
I'll try to simplify my story a bit, maybe I can get some help or advice:
I noticed that the Y axis started making an odd sound but only when running in one direction, the other direction sounded normal. The linear bearings are a bit noisy so I decided that maybe that was the issue. I lubed them, and basically took the machine almost entirely apart to see if I could determine if something was "hanging" up. I did succeed in making things nice and smooth, however, the noise persisted. The noise is sort of a "thump" or "bump" sound as the gantry travels...
Not long after this started I had my first stall. I was running at 800mm/min at the time which isn't THAT fast and I had not had a problem in several previous jobs at that speed. So I turned down the speed to 600. It stalled again. Doing a .4 mm cut in plastic no less. Something was wrong...
I then ran the same job in air. Same thing, stalling in the same direction on the Y axis. GRRRR!!!
So I went and purchased shielded cabling, in fact it's 2 twisted pairs, each pair shielded, then those are shielded. I redid the Y axis motor, grounding the shield wire properly. Ran a test run in air at 600mm/min, same problem... Frustrated I tried many different timing settings, even reinstalled EMC, nothing mattered. Only running at the slowest speeds would work and even then the motor still made the "bumping" noise in one direction.
At this point, none of the other axis made this noise at all and ran smoothly, same timings all around, same speeds.
Finally, I decided it was time to get serious and removed the motor from the machine and ran it by itself. I could literally feel the thumping, bumping. It's not constant, just random, sometimes hard sometimes soft. Then while letting the motor spin, it stalled. Free running at what would be about 1000 mm/min on the machine. ZERO load and it stalled, doing the standard BUZZ of a stalled stepper.
I then connected a known good stepper to the board in order to rule out the stepper being the issue. Same story, bumping, etc.
Even more frustrated I started to try different solutions. One of these was to directly ground the DIR pin, as the direction the motor was failing was one in which the pin would be low. Same problem. I put my oscilloscope on all the signal pins. Nothing strange to be seen except quite a bit of noise, but not enough to cause the bumping and stalling. Maybe it's the parallel port breakout board? The PC? ....
So, to rule that out, I disconnected the driver board entirely. I had connected: The power supply (which puts out nice clean power btw), the stepper motor, and my signal generator. I output a 1 kilohertz square wave at 50% duty cycle to the step pin... bump bump bump bump! ARGH!!!! Same story, so at this point it became obvious that the issue was the driver board.
Here is a video of the issue: Stepper Driver - YouTube
This is running off the included electronics, from EMC. If you turn up the volume you can hear a nice big thump at the beginning of the video, then subsequent quieter knocking sounds as it turns.
Here's the worst bit.... Last night when making a video for carving-cnc.com to review, I tested the X axis and now it's doing the same darn thing! I have asked them to replace both of the boards and sent them the video. Their response was that it's not a driver board issue. Instead I need to check my cables for loose wires and be sure to use their Mach3 software that they sent.
If they continue to give me the run around, I'm just submitting a paypal claim. I don't mess around with this crap any longer. I've been through enough messes in the past. I went into this knowing something could go wrong and that's fine. I'm not mad about it. However, I did pay for a product and expect it to work. :)
Anyhow, any advice? I have no idea what else to try. I've tried timings all over the board in EMC, even very high step pulse numbers. I started at 10000 ns and those worked great, at first...
At first it ran wonderfully and without a hitch. The speeds were actually pretty impressive for 24 volts. However, not long after I started to run into some issues.
I'll try to simplify my story a bit, maybe I can get some help or advice:
I noticed that the Y axis started making an odd sound but only when running in one direction, the other direction sounded normal. The linear bearings are a bit noisy so I decided that maybe that was the issue. I lubed them, and basically took the machine almost entirely apart to see if I could determine if something was "hanging" up. I did succeed in making things nice and smooth, however, the noise persisted. The noise is sort of a "thump" or "bump" sound as the gantry travels...
Not long after this started I had my first stall. I was running at 800mm/min at the time which isn't THAT fast and I had not had a problem in several previous jobs at that speed. So I turned down the speed to 600. It stalled again. Doing a .4 mm cut in plastic no less. Something was wrong...
I then ran the same job in air. Same thing, stalling in the same direction on the Y axis. GRRRR!!!
So I went and purchased shielded cabling, in fact it's 2 twisted pairs, each pair shielded, then those are shielded. I redid the Y axis motor, grounding the shield wire properly. Ran a test run in air at 600mm/min, same problem... Frustrated I tried many different timing settings, even reinstalled EMC, nothing mattered. Only running at the slowest speeds would work and even then the motor still made the "bumping" noise in one direction.
At this point, none of the other axis made this noise at all and ran smoothly, same timings all around, same speeds.
Finally, I decided it was time to get serious and removed the motor from the machine and ran it by itself. I could literally feel the thumping, bumping. It's not constant, just random, sometimes hard sometimes soft. Then while letting the motor spin, it stalled. Free running at what would be about 1000 mm/min on the machine. ZERO load and it stalled, doing the standard BUZZ of a stalled stepper.
I then connected a known good stepper to the board in order to rule out the stepper being the issue. Same story, bumping, etc.
Even more frustrated I started to try different solutions. One of these was to directly ground the DIR pin, as the direction the motor was failing was one in which the pin would be low. Same problem. I put my oscilloscope on all the signal pins. Nothing strange to be seen except quite a bit of noise, but not enough to cause the bumping and stalling. Maybe it's the parallel port breakout board? The PC? ....
So, to rule that out, I disconnected the driver board entirely. I had connected: The power supply (which puts out nice clean power btw), the stepper motor, and my signal generator. I output a 1 kilohertz square wave at 50% duty cycle to the step pin... bump bump bump bump! ARGH!!!! Same story, so at this point it became obvious that the issue was the driver board.
Here is a video of the issue: Stepper Driver - YouTube
This is running off the included electronics, from EMC. If you turn up the volume you can hear a nice big thump at the beginning of the video, then subsequent quieter knocking sounds as it turns.
Here's the worst bit.... Last night when making a video for carving-cnc.com to review, I tested the X axis and now it's doing the same darn thing! I have asked them to replace both of the boards and sent them the video. Their response was that it's not a driver board issue. Instead I need to check my cables for loose wires and be sure to use their Mach3 software that they sent.
If they continue to give me the run around, I'm just submitting a paypal claim. I don't mess around with this crap any longer. I've been through enough messes in the past. I went into this knowing something could go wrong and that's fine. I'm not mad about it. However, I did pay for a product and expect it to work. :)
Anyhow, any advice? I have no idea what else to try. I've tried timings all over the board in EMC, even very high step pulse numbers. I started at 10000 ns and those worked great, at first...