Ramps rebooting

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Troubleshooting
1

Oh great and powerful Vicious forum…

What would cause a Ramps board to reboot mid-cut?

I had it happen on the last two boards I was trying to cut. A different spot each time. First time it was just a few minutes into the cut. Second time it was about 17 minutes into the program. Weird part is, both reboots was right after a plunge to start cutting the next layer.

Could it be a bad SD Card? It’s a cheap one from Microcenter that I’ve had a year now.

What else would cause this?

 

Ramps board was bought from this site. Marlin 1.0.7 ( I think. Whatever was shipping a year ago). Board has been rock solid up until today.

2

Beer fridge or compressor kicking on? Loose Z cable, check the plug for signs of darkening on any pins.

3

Check the gcode for z movements with high feed rate. Same thing happened to me a while back and I eventually chased it down to that.

4

It happened shortly after I turned the Shop Vac Off the second time. Not sure if I was turning the shop vac on/off the first time. One thing I just remembered is I’m running it on a longer extension cord today. I have a reel with 4 plugs on it. Today I have that plugged into another extension cord instead of going all the way to the wall with it. You think it might be a brown-out?

5

The compressor and beer fridge were issues before for others. I don’t think its a brown out, more of a dirty spike.

6

nah. I don’t have anything else on this circuit. It’s just the garage, front porch and front porch light.

The only other thing I can think is if I have a Z stepper driver overheating.

I finally got a full cut out of this design by going to a ramp down instead of the plunge. This makes me think the z-speed might be related. What is an appropriate Z up/down speed?

The reason why I say this, is on the second board I cut, it was drilling a bunch of holes and towards the end it suddenly stopped going up all the way. I noticed after the cut was done that there was a paper towel blocking half the inlet on one of the cooling fans over the Ramps board right above the Z stepper.

I opened up the case and felt the heat sinks and none of them were hot, but the program had been stopped for a few minutes at this point.

7

allthread <8.4mm/s

T8 < 30mm/s

8

That might be it. I’ll take a look at the code tonight.

9

Look at the estlcam basics page and check your rapids. This is usually the issue.

10

I’m using Inventor with the Fusion360 post processor.

11

Which one, verify the rapids and plunges. This was the exact reason we had to make a PP for fusion.

12

I’m using MPCNC_Fusion360_V9_SDcard.cps - Marlin V1

This is with the single flute bit in 3/4" thick pine board.

My CAM software has the following settings:

Cutting FeedRate: 7 in/min (2.96 mm/sec)

Lead-in feedrate: 40 in/min (16.9 mm/sec)

Lead-out feedrate: 40 in/min (16.9 mm/sec)

Ramp feedrate: 13.33 in/min (5.6 mm / second)

Plunge feedrate: 13.33 in/min (5.6 mm / second)

13

What are post processor settings. Specifically the two that say Highfeedrate?

 

14

Really estlcam is a million times easier to use.

15

highXYFeedrate = 2000

highZFeedrate = 400

Not sure on the units. There’s none in the config file.

Honestly… ESTLCam or Inventor CAM are about the same. I get just as pissed at ESTLCam when I use it as Inventor’s CAM. Once you learn the workflow, it’s just getting the values correct.

16

Well I have no idea. The pp settings are correct, no fridge or compressor, no loose wires or dark pins.

1-What are the driver voltages reading while the steppers are engaged?

2-Upload your gcode (zip it first, or cut and paste the first 50-100 or so lines), just to make sure the PP is doing it’s job?

If it is not one of these two options there is literally nothing left other than a ghost. It has to be bad gcode, bad wiring (stepper or power), poorly set driver, or ghost. Last ditch effort is re-flash the board but I doubt that has anything to do with it.

 

17

I thought I put this in this post, but it may have only gone into the other one I made…

I’m wondering if the z-height issue might be related to two things.

  1. I noticed there was something covering half the fan inlet on my box covering the RAMPs board... specifically right over the fan blowing on the Z stepper driver.
  2. I noticed my Z axis seems to have some slack/give in both the x and y plane. If you grab the top and bottom, you can kind of wiggle it back and forth a little.
I'm also wondering if there isn't some sawdust stuck in the threads somewhere that might be causing it to occasionally bind. I noticed some of the bearings weren't spinning on Sunday, so I grabbed the compressor and blew them all out.

I guess none of those should be causing the ramps to occasionally reboot, though. I won’t rule out the power supply. It’s a cheap Chinese one that came with my 3d printer. It doesn’t have a cooling fan on it, but it wasn’t exactly hot outside this weekend either… and it ran fine all last summer.

I might try pulling all the hardware out of the little enclosed area it’s currently installed. It’ll help with monitoring things while it’s running.

18

You should be able to easily turn the Z axis screw with your fingers, the full range both directions.

19

Yeah. I can do that… do it quite often actually.

The only other thing I just thought of, is I wonder if I have a bad stepper motor. I had those z-axis stepper driver issues last summer and I replaced the driver… then I have the voltage configured wrong for a little while and the stepper motor was running really hot.

I fixed that and the motor doesn’t run hot anymore, but I wonder if the motor got damage in the process and is occasionally shorting out internally or something.

What size stepper motor should I be running on my Z? I can try picking up a new one.

20

It is not normal for the components to work sometimes and not others. I would try just swapping it with a different axis first.

We use ~75ozin usually.