[emojo5]

I was wondering if I could ask you about an issue I’ve been having with my Sherline mill and Mach 3.

First let me tell you about my setup. I’m running Mach 3 (R3.043.066) on a Sherline Mill 5400 setup,
with a DeepGroove1 Controller Box (Gecko 4 axis), also I have a Soigeneris Ethernet Smooth Stepper (SSENC-2). My XLM file was provided by Soigeneris.


I did my Sherline/Mach 3 (ports and pins, motor speeds, and others) setup by using tutorials I found on YouTube.


My issue is this. When I open Mach 3, and run the profile given to me by someone from Soigeneris,
it seem that my X-axis runs in the positive and minus direction, even though, I’m only pressing
the left minus arrow key.


Let me explain. If I press and hold, the “left minus” arrow key, the table will move to the left. If I stop, press the “left minus” arrow again, it will then move to the right, or “right plus” direction. There is no rhyme or reason to when it will run in the wrong direction. And it seems to be only the X-Axis that does this. The Z and the Y Axis’s do not have this issue. It’s driving me mad.


I assume that this is a “Ports and Pins” issue. I’ve looked at the Pins config screen, but I don’t see anything odd about the settings. I’m stuck and don’t know the first thing about how
to correct this problem.


Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.


-EM

[coherent]

Make sure in Mach you aren't using the same pin for step and direction. If it's a port/pin issue then it should be easy to identify.
My first guess is that it's prob a loose or shorted wire at your driver board or breakout board. Disconnect from power and triple check all of your connections at your driver, breakout board stepper drivers etc to ensure nothing is loose. Pull on each wire to ensure is secured in every terminal block. If everything is solid, check your cables with a multi-meter. Even wiggle the cable at the connector end. Make sure no connections are bad, intermittent or grounding to ground or the connector cover or shorting to another wire in the cable.

[emojo5]

Hi Coherent.

Thanks for responding to my question. Great suggestions on trouble shoot the issue. In addition to post about this here, I also sent email to both Deepgroove1 and Soigeneris. They both quickly responded. Jeff Birt from Soigeneris made a great suggestion. He thought that it could be a short in the X-axis motor leads. He was correct. I swapped out the motor for a fresh one and problem solved. Something to note for anyone else that could running an issue like this. 2 the issues with this mother, that I didn't mention but should have were this. This motor was running noisier that the other 2, and this one got hot very quickly. I didn't think those 2 issues were related but Jeff asked about the noise thing. Huge help to me. Thanks again Coherent. Issue solved.

-emojo5

[coherent]

Yea, I've had the same issue on a couple different machines and for me it's always been a loose or shorted wire or cable. Glad you got if fixed!.