cmcgrath5035

I have been at this for a while, don’t necessarily remember all the items I have posted but as you have found, Google can help.

When you say “Arduino and stepper drivers”, do yo mean Arduino Duo or Uno driving external drivers, or the Pololu style mini plug-in modules. While I have no direct hands-on experience, to me they visually do not have adequate thermal dissipation capability.

retrofitting old systems with unknown specifications is at best trial and error, at worst a crap shoot. But think about how much you are learning…
If the original mechanical design really did demand NEMA34 performance, you will be better off with external, more rugged thermal design drivers.

You can try interfacing the tinyG logic directly to the external drivers.
The driver inputs for pulse, dir and enable are simply Opto Isolators with some current limiting resistors so the can withstand high voltage interfaces. The FET buffer/level shifters are for the most part just adding robustness to the interfaces.

Using external drivers is non-trivial but successfully implemented by others.
It is not at all plug and play.
I suggest you use your Favorite Search engine to search on “tinyG External Drivers”. Most hits you find will be other items in this forum.
I am on the road for a few days and can’t be a lot of help.

At all NEMA sizes, there are different winding configurations that require different drive currents to operate properly.
A very general statement would be that motors that have more turns per pole(more copper) will require less current to step properly but will exhibit more inductance and be less responsive.

What power supply voltage are you using? More voltage will provide more power into the steppers.

A frequent cause of EEPROM corruption has been attempts to ‘script’ sending parameters to tinyG in bulk.
Enter parameter changes manually via the console, one at a time.

I saw John Lauer’s suggestion to reduce Vmax, a good one.
Reduce 16000 to 1600 or 160, just to see if that helps.

Do you have the current pots all the way up?

While I have never seen steppers that did not like to microstep, try setting
$1mi = $2mi = $3mi = 1. If that helps, try = 2 or = 4.

There is a lot to chew on here, I have limited time at the moment.

Flow control:
Set tiny G to $ex=2 and only check the RTS box in Coolterm.

You still have both m3 and m4 mapped to the Z axis.
When tinyG tries to move Z axis, it won’t know which parameters to use.
map m4 to a,b or c for now.

set $zsm=0 to turn off that limit switch.

Try jogging your machine at slower speeds,
for example use G01 X10 1000 to request a 10mm move at 1000 mm/min.
G00 X10 attempts to move at max velocity.

I’ll be off the air for a couple days.

You might want to disconnect your motors from the leadscrews to get motors moving reliably without load.put a piece of tape on the motor shafts so you can see them rotate.

A couple parameter comments before you post an updated $$ dump

You have $ex=1, Xon/Xoff. Have you correctly set the CoolTerm end?

Get rid of limit switches for now, set $xsn = 0 and $ysn=0 and $zsm =0.
You have a lot of wiring work to do for the limits – stepper noise can cause false shutdowns.

You can get a roughly right $3tr by measuring the distance between 10(not 19 !) thread grooves in that lead screw(in mm) then set $3tr =[measurement]/10

• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by cmcgrath5035. Reason: Correct error

I did not have access to the parameter set, you have likely already already seen the request from Google.

The “default” assumed machine is a Shapeoko style belt machine, X-Y-Y(r)-Z.
From what I can see, you likely have only three active leadscrews.
A belt machine has typical $_tr values in the 30-40mm range, lead screws will be very different. When I can see all your parameters, we move on from there.