Freesteel Blog » Quick machining update

Quick machining update

Monday, March 7th, 2016 at 12:12 pm Written by:

The less said and remembered about the fighting I’ve had over the past three weeks attempting to get this working the better.

l20160307_120429

Basically, the problem was eventually traced down to a faulty solder joint on the ground pin of the six channel open collector chip which created too much of a resistance to drain the 5V signal down to ground for the gecko drive to respond in the rare case where four 1-signals were emitted from the Machinekit controller at the same time. This happened only when two of the axes were moving with the direction pins high and two step signals went to the motors simultaneously. This resulted in travel in the Y-positive direction missing 1% of its pulses so that the cutting toolpath drifted ever so slightly in the Y-negative direction as cutting progressed, but there being no effect when you jogged the table or arm axes individually. Drove me nuts, as you can imagine.

It was a learning experience. If we can nail this bug, we can nail anything (we had to check through so many other problems which weren’t there to find it), but it set us back weeks of worry, pain, late nights and missing weekends


Quick edited movie with limited footage as I forgot to film a lot of the exciting bits (like the helix ramping) as was a bit too scared to think of it.

1 Comment

  • 1. Adrian McEwen replies at 7th March 2016, 3:41 pm :

    There’s a bit more video footage in this instagram video I took, which I think is some of the helix ramping(?)

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