Steppers Clunking every second

[Brandocnc]

Hi, i am seting up my system with mach 3 and trying to figure out how to get my motors to run smothly. I have 3 gecko 202 drivers and a pmdx 131 breakout board that the geckos plug onto. I messed with the tuning of the motors and got them to all work decently, but no matter what acceleration or velocity they are set at they make a clunk sound every second. All of the motors make this sound at the same time interval regardless of the speed they are running at. Im pretty sure the motor is missing a step when i hear this noise. The motors can make several revolutions usually and then they will lock up after a few of these clunks. Has anyone had this problem? It seems like it is probably just a setting im overlooking. Please help!

[ger21]

Run the drivertest.exe in the Mach folder and see if you get a smooth flat line. Sounds like some Windows process might be interfering with Mach3.

[Brandocnc]

I ran the driver test and it gave me a flat line that had some really small noise on it here and there. I did have a spike every once and a while, but it didnt' look evenly timed like these clunks are.
Could it have something to do with my power supply? It seems like something is just of of timing.

[ger21]

Were the spikes large?

[Brandocnc]

There were speratic spikes that went between 32 and 48 on the y axis, but there were very few. What im experiencing is evenly timed regardless of the motor speed and on 2 different types of motors as well.

[SORCHEROR]

i had the same problem with one of my motors and i run 201 geckos,almost the same,the problem was the 5 volts supply to the gecko,the ground wasnt a good connection,i think on the 202 its called comon,pin 10 i beleive,on the 201 you hookup 5 volts there,but on the new ones i think its a common ground hooked to the breakout board,i bet thats it,my y axis motor would move than start clunking and locking up than making a clunking atempt to move,sounds like your problem,hope that helps,also you didnt daisy chain your wiring?each drive need its own lines for each hookup going directly to the supply,grounds too,you cant go from drive to drive

[SORCHEROR]

one more thing,what type of wire are you using,it has to be sheilded and ground the sheild at one end,you might be having interferace issues,and your stepper and supply line have to be at least a 1/4 away from all TTL lines

[Brandocnc]

Well, it may be a grounding issue, but maybe not in the way you described. My breakout board is the pmdx model that mounts the gecko drives directly on it. The only wiring that i had to do was my 4 motor wires to the gecko drive. Every other pin plugs directly into the breakout board. Nice and clean with very little wiring.

[SORCHEROR]

when you move only one axis at a time,do the other motors,chatter or clunk?
this would be an interference sign,what kind of power supply are you running,make?voltage?regulated?swicthing?
can never have to much info when trying to find solution
thanks,steve

[Brandocnc]

I have all of the electronics just mocked up and laying on my mdf table top. The motors are siting right next to the board " around 8 inches away" with the wires directly from the motor pluged into the driver. I seriously think there is something that is timed wrong in my setting or something. It is a very consistently timed clunk. Oh, what is a ttl line?

[Brandocnc]

my power supply was taken from a medical equipment robot. around 30v im reading 12.5 amp not sure the make, says coutant lambda , and omega on the top. Not sure if it is switching or not. Doesnt have the round transformer. When i move 1 motor at a time, only that motor clunks.

[SORCHEROR]

TTL lines are the logic wires,(step/direction)but your board has them built in
im curious,did you remember to add the current resistor to the geckos?what size motors are you running?your power supply is 12 amps so maybe your just feeding to much power to the motors,might be,not sure,but you should have a resistor on the gecko to match the amps the motor needs,check all the jumper settings on the pmdx boards make sure they are correct