Kflop not working... doesn't appear to be sending signals to stepper drives

In the midst of producing a bunch of orders for the holidays, my machine stopped working today. I'm at a loss as to what is happening, but I'm worried that maybe my Kflop is somehow fried. When I turn on my system, my steppers energize and "clunk" and thus have holding torque. Usually, when Kflop goes through its routine with the blinking lights, I hear a second clunk when the lights stop blinking and become solid. This is not happening. Kflop appears to go through its startup routine, and indeed, I can see and connect to the board from my computer. When I initialize and then try to control the machine all I see is the DRO moving, but nothing happens at the machine. All my connections are sound. Is it possible to have the board fried, but still have all the right lights illuminated and still see it and connect to it? I downloaded the newest version of Kmotion and Kmotion cnc to see if that might resolve things, but the same problem persists. Any ideas? If I can't suss this out in the next couple of days, I'm going to have to send out a bunch of refunds, which I really hope I don't have to do.

I was just futsing with 5vdc connection from Kanalog to my bus that supplies 5v signal voltage to my drives, and I could cause the steppers to engage a second clunk. I checked the voltage coming out of KAnalog and it appeared that around 9vdc out of JP8. My 5vdcsupply was putting out the same. I disconnected the supply at this point, but I'm surprise that the board wasn't just fried from getting 9v. I have no idea why my supply is putting out 9v all of a sudden. Tom, this is a supply that you recommended to me some time last year, and has been solid to this point.

Hi Spank,

Pulling the +5V input to +9V is likely to cause damage. It might be possible that something else is pulling the +5V voltage up. For example a shorted Motor Drive.

I suspect you will need to go step by step and test one component in your system at a time.

Regards

Hi Tom,
Looks like the PSU for some reason is now a 9v PSU. I got a new 5v supply this morning, and it works. Now I am having a problem (which was showing up prior to the PSU issue) with my Y motor running very rough and stalling...sounds almost like gravel. This first happened last week, and I figured that the motor was shot, so I swapped it out with a new one. Everything was ok for a few days, now the same problem is popping up with the new one, although it seems to go away if I turn off my control box for a bit. It's strange because the motor and the drive don't feel excessively hot, certainly not any more so the other motors or drives, which are all identical. I am also losing steps when the motor seems to be running fine (ie not all rough). The steps seem to be getting lost at the beginning of a y movement, as I can hear a clunking just as the program is calling for the machine to move in Y. At the end of a typical program, I am off by about 1/8" in Y. This is incredibly frustrating to have all of these problems snowball all at once.

Hi Spank,

What kind of motors and rives do you have? I thought you had Servos connected to Kanalog? Maybe your Servo tuning is marginal? Do you have encoders? If so when the machine is miss behaving are you able to make a move on the Step Response Screen at the right speed and observe the "growling"?

Regards

Hi Tom,
I have two machines that use kflop for control, one servo and one stepper. The machine with the issues is the stepper machine, and I haven't hooked up encoders to it yet, although I plan on it at some point soon. The motors are Oriental motor pk299, with centent cn0165 drives.
Eli


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Hi Eli,

Hard to say what the issue could be. Could the clunking be caused by the drives coming out of standby current?

It might be worthwhile to add encoders just to diagnose problems like this. Otherwise you are basically running blind.

Regards

Try moving the y motor to a different drive. If it works then your y drive may be faulty. You should also try moving the y drive to a different axis and see if the problem follows the drive.

Ben

Thanks ben and Tom. I will try switching the drive to see what happens. I have a spare drive that I can swap.