Homing sequence reversed AXYZ AMC0004G Board (Multicam Australia Series IIS) Router

[Ross_N]

Hi
I have recently purchased two older Multican (Australia) CNC routers. Both run on AXYZ boards from ToolPath on Windows 98. setting up one machine seems to be going well, however the second is throwing me a challenge at the first hurdle.

When powering on, the spindle begins to move down till it hits the end of the lead screw and the stepper starts skipping steps. The other machine moves the spindle up till it reaches the top limit sensor.
Also, if I initiate a Function 12 (seek absolute origin), again the z axis moves down a bit till Error 11 ( Emergency stop or Z limit sensor) pops up on the pendant display. Pressing enter and accepting seek X,Y, the gantry moves in the x and y directions away from the 0,0 a short distance till Error 41 (Emergency stop or X or Y limit sensor) pops up.

There is one E-Stop which is NO. The sensors and Estop are wired in parallel and share a three wire connector into the controller, so I'm imagining the sensors are NO too.
If I pull the plug so no sensors or the E-Stop is connected, the same behaviour described above happens.
With the sensors plugged in, contacting the sensors with a screwdriver doesn't change the status of any LEDs in the control cabinet.

Any hints?

Thanks very much.

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[routalot]

I would be looking at the wiring in both for comparison,just in case the gantry had been removed for shipping and reconnected wrongly.I'm suspecting the direction of at least one stepper is reversed and if I understand correctly that the X and Y move away from 0 when they should be homing,they would be suspect too.I would also be asking a local electrician if the power supply to the machine might be connected wrongly as I have known other woodworking machines to run backwards when connected to a three phase power supply with the connections switched.

Good luck with Toolpath.............

[Ross_N]

Thanks routalot
Sounds logical although the machine was only removed from production a week ago, to my knowledge working fine, not disassembled in any way and the board and steppers run on single phase. Further, when jogging the machine using the sub console board the spindle moves as expected.

I'm wondering perhaps the electronics were damaged during the move. When loading the machine on the flatbed, a guy manually manually jogged the gantry from one end of the machine to the other which I understand can wreak havoc. I'll get a chance to poke around on Monday. Fingers crossed for an easy solution.

Yep ToolPath is like a journey back in time

[Ross_N]

Well that's exciting! I just traced the sensor wiring and found that one of the two z height limit sensors (one at 100mm, the other at 250mm) seems to be misbehaving. There is a toggle switch on the spindle to select 100 or 250 mm z home and when the 250 height is selected I get the errors and when the 100mm z height is selected, homing functions correctly. Feels nice to have something to fix rather than something that eludes diagnosis.

The apparent reversal of the homing sequence seems to be the machine doing it's moves toward the active origin in each axis, which is naturally set away from the absolute (home) origins. Turns out I had just misinterpreted what was happening.

[routalot]

Good to know you found the problem bu a couple of things slightly surprise me.A 250mm Z axis is a bit generous,but I suppose if you are working on a project that needs a jig on the table,which eats into the available Z capacity it makes sense.The datum shift is something I would expect to see after the machine has homed at the absolute home position,but I am only familiar with AXYZ machines and not Multicam. It certainly should be a robust operating system,if a little quirky and I hope you don't have to deal with the sluggish baud rate that AXYZ had in those days.

[blazk]

I just had this problem. I found out that without air and with checking the tooltip sensor was fully up after connecting air triggered estop (error 11) warning and makes z go down instead of up.