Ok, finished the build on the AR3. Was having issues getting anything to work ,but then realized that I had the motor driver switches backwards (who uses DOWN for ON??!?!)
Anyhow, I'm currently experiencing 2 issues -
1) The motor driver for J6 is slow flashing a red light and I can't get the motor to do anything. I've double checked the wiring visually between the motor and the port on the robot and that all seems correct (splices are correct color-color, and on the right pins of the port), checked the cable (tried swapping out cables), and checked the continuity of the control box port-controller. All looks good. Checked all the other wires going in into the controller and they all seem to be right. Kinda stumped as to what to check next. Any help appreciated. Do I maybe have a bad controller? I guess I could try swapping the configuration with J5 and see if it works or gives the same error...
2) J5 works, but seems to have a TON of slop when changing directions. When I command a 10 degree change in the opposite direction, I don't see any movement at all, but when I then do another 10 in the same direction I see it move properly. If I then command 10 in the opposite direction I see nothing until I do a second 10 in that direction. Any ideas how to remove/adjust this slop out?
3) Which direction is +/- supposed to be for each joint?
Couple other things I've noticed:
1) J3 pressing + makes the joint move correctly, I do the calibration of J3 and when its resting on the limit switch it's showing 143 like it should. When I then tell it to move - with a 140 degrees to jog at the end it moves back near vertical but it's showing 283.65 degrees??? Something seems weird there. Any command I put in regardless of direction moved (which is correct) is constantly increasing the angle and step count.
2) If I have the J6 cable attached then I'm not getting any connectivity to the Teensy or the Mega. I'm wondering if I somehow cross the black wire of the encoder with the black wire of the motor when wiring up joint 6, but I don't see how considering they are done in completely different manual steps... and I DID test the continuity of all the wires in the encoder connector all the way down to the ethernet cable and it came back as connected so I don't think that's it.