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EdwardMember
Hi Alden,
– I believe that I can reproduce the issue whether the power supply is connector or not, but the initial occurrences were both after I had physically moved the machine, so power supply definitely disconnected.
– EStop breaks the +24v. I understood from the shapeoko forum that, with the arduino & Grbl at least, breaking the -ve could allow power back through the USB line? Please see this link for a diagram my wiring set-up.
– By ‘variable amounts of movement’ in my earlier post, I meant that it might take a dozen or more physical moves of various speeds to trigger the flash loss. It is not instant or entirely predictable, but, even if it takes a couple of minutes, I believe can reliably cause the problem. Regarding your first question, the power supply was connected but Estop down during my tests of this from yesterday.
– Chip is: ATXMEGA192A3
Let me know if you need anything else,
E
- This reply was modified 11 years, 4 months ago by Edward.
EdwardMemberYep – I’m near certain that this is the cause of the issue and I can reliably (but with variable amounts of movement) reproduce it on at least two boards.
I’m in an unusual situation of lugging my machine around with me quite a bit recently, so that is probably why I have seen it fairly frequently. Isolating the motors from the board electronically would be a bit awkward to implement, but now I am confident of the source of the problem I will be able to take care to mechanically ‘lock’ the machine in place when I move it to prevent the problem from now on. I hope this feedback (no pun intended) is useful 😉
Cheers
E
EdwardMemberHello all,
Just to update on this as it is looking pretty certain that the problem is down to my code and not the TinyG…
I had an update loop that was *supposed* to issue commands one at a time, waiting for the command acknowledgement in between. It was also intended to keep track of subsequent (but asynchronous) status reports following command completion. However I became suspicious yesterday that I had probably not been taking account of the feed hold (!) and queue flush (%) commands correctly in my own command, acknowledgement, report cycle, and this could cause me to get out of synch with the TinyG. A quick test last night seems to confirm that I can reproduce the problem described above, but only when I send rapid commands without correctly waiting for an acknowledgement in between. I hope this information might still be useful if other encounter a similar issue.
Cheers
E
EdwardMemberHi Alden,
The board is disconnected using the Estop (and indeed no power supply is even plugged in), but I have this simply breaking the +ve input lead from the supply, as per the shapeoko instructions for the Arduino + Grbl, so I’m not sure that this can have any role in the back EMF issue from the motors?
Just to clarify – moving the machine head manually in this configuration lights the motor LEDs, as you would say above, but *also*, briefly, the blue power LED and Spindle CW/CCW LED (normally associated with the boot loader sequence).
In the process of checking this statement, the firmware seems to have gone again (boot sequence flashes no longer complete). I’ll reflash the board now and do the same steps in a more methodical way, then I’ll swap over boards to check that I can reproduce on more than one card. I will report back in due course.
Cheers
E
EdwardMemberJust found this: https://github.com/synthetos/TinyG/wiki/TinyG-Feedhold-and-Resume
So modifying accordingly.
Cheers
E
EdwardMemberRighto, thanks for the extra information on the repo structure Alden. I’ll hang on for the project file to go into the edge branch and I fully appreciate that you have many other demands, so no worries there. I’ll have another go at building once that is in.
You might like to know that I do already have a reasonable pen drawing demo up and running for an educational science and engineering show I’m attending on Tuesday with the local school computer club I run here in the UK. Given that the shapeoko only arrived in kit form last Monday, I am very pleased with how straightforward it has all been. The nature of this forum means you probably only ever hear the negatives, so I thought I’d redress the balance a bit! 🙂
Cheers,
E
EdwardMember@mcgyvr – Thanks for the link, I’ve created something similar in JSON that I send on initializing and first connecting. This does indeed resolve the practical problem, I am actually interested in understanding and building the firmware for myself though, and I thought that fixing this for my specific setup would be a good first exercise.
@Alden – That would be great, Riley pointed me at the Edge branch in a different thread and so I assume that this is the one to keep up with? Just for the record, is my basic premise even correct that swapping out the included headers is the correct way to build a custom firmware specifically for the shapeoko?Cheers
E
EdwardMemberHi Riley,
Yes – avrdude used to reflash. I’ve just switched to the edge branch and flashed the default/tinyg.hex as you suggested. No problems there, but in this branch the Atmel Studio solution can no longer find its tinyg subproject (\TinyG\firmware\tinyg\tinyg.cproj), which does indeed appear to be missing. As a result I don’t seem to be able to build this branch in Atmel Studio 6.1 (SP1)? Is this a known issue or are there some other steps I need here?
Cheers
E
EdwardMemberJust a quick update – re-flashing the firmware from the default build on github (TinyG/firmware/tinyg/default/tinyg.hex?) has restored the board to its happy, non-blinking, former self.
It also caused me to take the plunge and have a go at building the firmware from source anyway, but I will post about this separately to avoid moving off this thread’s original topic.
Cheers
E
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