I’m still insanely new to my mpcnc router. I’ve only gotten to using it a hand full of times, but over the weekend I had something really strange happen to me. During a project, it seems my x-axis stopped working. Being semi-technical minded, it seems like the driver shut itself off like it was over-heating, but that is really strange to me because I have my mpcnc in an uninsulated, michigan garage. The ambient temp couldn’t have been over 30F. I have heatsinks on the drivers chips, and I have a 120mm computer fan pointed at them too, so over-heating doesn’t seem likely.
So here’s what happened, halfway through my project, the x-axis seems to have stopped responding. I touch the stepper motors, and they’re cool to the touch, while the rest are warm, and then I check if they’re holding their position, but I’m able to spin them freely as if they were unpowered. At that point, I cancel the project and cut power to the arduino/ramps board for a minute before powering it back up and connecting with repetier host, and I’m able to use the manual controls and the x-axis is responding fine.
It’s weird, because it seems like the x-axis driver shut off on me for some reason, but I can’t figure out why it would have done that. Does anyone have any thoughts on what might have caused this or how I might help keeping it from happening in the future?
For some background info… Nothing appeared damaged. All the wires were connected. I don’t believe I’m dealing with damaged hardware or poorly constructed hardware simply because after powering it all down for a minute, things were back to working like normal.
Hi I am using the Drv8825 and these NEMA 17 steppers. I haven’t set the pots yet, so I’m guessing that’s likely my issue.
Though with active cooling, heatsinks, and an ambient temp below freezing, does that sound likely to run into thermal shut down? I get that it’s a very localized source of heat, it just sounded odd given how cold the environment was for it. I think at my worst case, it seems to be intermittent, nothing appears to be getting damaged, though I’d like to avoid pushing it to it’s limits obviously. Hopefully this is all it’ll take to fix it.
I’ll check the current limit tonight and see if that resolves it and post back next time I give it a test run. Thanks!
Yeah the pots are set to 1.6V, If you have thermal throttled them too many times they could go bad, as well as your steppers. That is more than double double what giant nema 17’s can handle solo or in series.
The surrounding room doesn’t have a huge effect on that much heat made that fast in that small of an area, the fan helps for sure, but you could possibly have damaged something.
After giving it a few to cool back down, everything did seem to be back in working order, but I decided not to restart the cnc project until I had it diagnosed and hopefully corrected. This is the first time I’ve run into this that I’m aware of. I’m really looking forward to getting a fine tuned understanding of working with my mpcnc. Getting a good feel for feed and speed rates I think is where I’m currently feeling things out a lot, but tonight, I’m hoping I can get this all squared away pretty easily and keep on getting a feed for it all.