zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4

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Thread: zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4

  1. #1
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    Default zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4

    My son brought over a new-to-be toy this past weekend, a pile of parts that we assembled into a little CNC machine by Zen. Got everything assembled and started on the control. He had an Arduino with Ramps v1.4 board that was populated for now with 3 stepper controllers. The Arduino ran our test program first try, with a blinking LED indicating that it was stepping each axis, but nothing mechanical happened. We eventually discovered that the motor controllers were not the same as the Ramps board was expecting, because the Sleep and Reset pins were active low instead of active high, so the controllers were not responding. A few bodge wires to pull those pins high got the whole thing humming nicely with each axis moving alternately back and forth as our test program cycled. The controllers were getting very hot at first, and we found that the current limiters were set to highest value, so we dialed them back so that current through the motor windings was about 0.7A and the controllers then ran just a bit warm to the touch, plus the motors seemed to run smoother, or at least they sounded better... But that was the end of our joy :^(

    We initially tried loading Marlin and using that to drive the machine axes forward and back, but only seemed to get one pulse the first time we tried to move in a direction, then one pulse again the first time we tried to reverse directions. Didn't matter whether we sent one step command, 10 steps, or 100, using either the GUI or directly entering gcode. Then we tried the Repetier/Repetier Host code and got movement, but not correct operation. At first, regardless of commanded direction, the X axis only went one way and wouldn't stop after the specified number of steps, requiring us to hit reset on the board or emergency stop on the screen. Although we thought we'd disabled axis stops, apparently we hadn't because the continuous stepping problem went away when we jumpered the Ramps' stop pins to ground. However, we then noticed that commanding X axis motion resulted in not only X but also Y axis movement (at a much lower rate that sounded a bit syncopated compared with the continuous stepping of the X axis). Whilst investigating that, we noticed that the X axis motion was not actually what we commanded. Direction of rotation seemed to change more or less at random regardless of what we specified. Sometimes it went the direction commanded five or six times in a row, but randomly it went the opposite direction instead. We reloaded our test program that directly set the Arduino pins to specify direction and step, and were able to drive each axis the commanded number of steps in the specified direction with no errors. Reloaded the Marlin code and got the same single pulses as before, reloaded Repetier and got the same random directions.

    It was late by this stage and we were fresh out of ideas as to what was going on or what to do next. My google-fu doesn't seem to be good and I'm not finding anything like this behavior. Anybody have any experience or even just suggestions on what might be wrong and/or how to trouble shoot this? TIA

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  2. #2
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    Default Re: zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4

    nobody with any Ramps 1.4 experience?



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zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4

zen toolworks cnc with ramps v1.4