I did my first boot up of the robot yesterday. Nearly everything was fine. The limit switches checked out. The encoders were reading. And all the motors could be jogged with the exception of J4. That one makes a small noise but doesn't move. I've verified that the belt isn't too tight. There is no difficulty turning that axis when it is not powered. So there doesn't seem to be anything mechanical holding it from rotating. We checked the motor cables (swapped a working one and it didn't make a difference). And we've used a multimeter to verify the wiring between the controller and the motor. However, early on we noticed some poor soldering of that motor cable. We mistakenly may have shorted across two of the four motor wires. We are wondering if that could have damaged the motor. Is it possible to damage anything in the motor with a faulty soldered connection? Can you suggest a way we can test this?
If necessary I can order a replacement motor and encoder. Can I do this directly from StepperOnline. If so can you suggest a part number. When I search for it I get the page for the entire kit.
Thanks!
Mark
Hi Mark! You mentioned that you checked the motor cables, however you didn't specify whether you checked the actual driver. Often times the driver is the point of failure, way before the motor itself.
I would suggest you try and swap around the cables of a known-good driver, with the J4 motor in question. Of course, you could also try the J4 driver with another motor if that is more convenient.
Let me know how that works out. Best of luck!
Hi Emil,
The J4 driver is different from the others. But I did set the DIP switches on one to match J4 and tried it. The J4 motor did move. Maybe that motor driver is messed up.
Mark
Hi,
Yes, the J4 driver hardware (DM320T stepper driver) was/is the problem. The Enabled state is reversed. To test if yours is this way simply remove the wire from Enabled and see if it works. Note that with it removed the emergency stop won't work because it won't stop that motor. I'd be interested to hear if this fixes the problem for you.
Mark
