I recently built a new DIY scratch built machine and have just commissioned it using Estlcam 12.064. It is a smaller milling machine for doing smaller work and also for aluminium stuff that I do quite a bit of.
The first job, a simple one, was to cut an L shaped cut for a fence for the same machine.
I was so disappointed when the machine kept halting in mid cut, which happened at random.
I noticed a message appear on the screen that the Pause/Stop button had been pressed (which I had not touched) By pressing the software Run Button, the job would continue and then the same would happen and any random point. After it happening around 9 or 10 times and wanting to keep the job as I didn’t want to loose it, I decided that I would deactivate the Pause/Stop switch in the firmware.
At this point I didn’t know what to blame, hardware, new software or new firmware and everything was all new and nothing had been fully tested.
I continued with the job, Estlcam picked up were it left off with no problem, but once again, the machine halted at random, but now no message on the screen. This was so annoying and was taking hours to do a simple job that should have only have been minutes.
Eventually the job had finished, no loss of material, but a huge loss in time and a lot of frustration.
I decided to let Christian know about the problem, and while waiting for a reply, which came back fairly quickly I must add, I disconnected the pin on the Nano board for the Pause/Stop button, physically. I still hadn’t tested yet as Christian replied so quickly, saying that he thought it must be an electrical fault.
After updating Christian about what I had done so far I decided to run the same job again in mid air (no material) I kept the spindle active in case that was something to do with what was going on.
The job ran from beginning to end without a hitch, no halting, no problems whatever.
I checked the wiring again for that section and found that it was all good, I had made no mistakes and there was no bad connections. There could only be one possible component and that was a new momentary switch that was used for the actual Pause/Stop button.
I connected everything up again and did some more testing, and the button was working as it should, so that tested the electrical wiring was correct, and also the the software was correct as well. I tapped the side of the switch case a few times to simulate vibrations and low and behold, the switch activated showing that there was a problem within the switch itself.
I have plenty of these switches, so replacing it is not a problem, except a bit of a pain as I have to pull part of the console apart to get at it properly, so I will leave that disconnected for a few days or even weeks.
So a nightmare of a problem turned out to be a cheap switch that was faulty, that worked but didn’t work sometimes having random connections.
I thought I would let you guys know what happened because it could happen to anyone and have them pully their hair out and blaming all kinds of things without realising that new things may not be in good condition when you buy them.