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IndustryArena Forum > CNC Electronics > Gecko Drives > Help - servos not working.
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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
    Posts
    62

    Help - servos not working.

    Hi - I am a relative newbie to CNC. I have a good solid quality mill that I bought about 5 yrs ago to make model aircraft moulds. It has a UCCNC ETH-300 motion controller, CNC4PC C23 breakout board, G320X Gecko drives, Fuling dzb200b002.2l2dk VFD inverter, servo drives and ball screws on linear rails.

    This problem happened a couple of times and was rectified with a restart, but yesterday I was jogging it around preparing for a job and seems to now be permanent.

    The problem is that the servos won't stay on at all. When I start the machine and then press the servo start button, you can hear the servos chatter while I'm pressing the button but they shut off immediately I let go of the button.

    Looking at the Gecko drives, the power and fault lights are lit on all 3 drives. "In Pos" and “Warn" lights are not lit. I can't see any other errors anywhere.

    Normally I'd contact Justin at Vermec, where I bought the machine and he'd probably diagnose it in a few minutes, but he's away and uncontactable.

    Any tips on where to start?

    Thanks,
    Andrew

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
    Posts
    62

    Re: Help - servos not working.

    Can anyone help?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Posts
    35538

    Re: Help - servos not working.

    There may be a fault on one drive, and they are wired so that the one is faulting all of them. It's going to take some troubleshooting, with detailed knowledge of how it's setup.
    Gerry

    UCCNC 2017 Screenset
    http://www.thecncwoodworker.com/2017.html

    Mach3 2010 Screenset
    http://www.thecncwoodworker.com/2010.html

    JointCAM - CNC Dovetails & Box Joints
    http://www.g-forcecnc.com/jointcam.html

    (Note: The opinions expressed in this post are my own and are not necessarily those of CNCzone and its management)

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
    Posts
    62

    Re: Help - servos not working.

    Hey Gerry, thanks. I have been busy but got time to have a look at it again this afternoon. I disconnected the Z gecko drive, and the X and Y drives fired up normally so I thought yay, it’s all due to a dud drive - expensive but at least an easy diagnosis. I shut it down again and plugged the Z gecko drive back together and restarted it all to verify that it caused it to all fault out, but it didn’t! It all works fine. So it’s an intermittent fault. That’s consistent with the recent history … it actually shut the drives off a couple of times in the previous week, and it came good with a bit of fiddling. This last time it seemed permanent but now it’s back to working. So I'm none the wiser really.
    A

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jan 2007
    Posts
    467

    Re: Help - servos not working.

    The problem sounds like it may be an encoder issue. If you remove a motor from the machine and bench test it does it continue to show a FAULT state at all times? You will need to reset the drives on power up by connecting terminals 5 and 7 for five seconds. Did you tune the PID trimpots when you first set the drives up?
    Marcus Freimanis
    www.geckodrive.com

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