Don’t give it up for dead yet. Start tracking the wires/connections back, might be as simple as a loose one somewhere.
The wires are soldered with heat shrink tubing around them. Is there any easy way to test the wires with a meter to be sure they are all making good connections?
Did you straight-wire the entire thing from the motor all the way to the enclosure? No connection points along the way that you can test? The video shows an 8-screw connection strip a few inches below the Z-axis motor - if you’ve got that you can test to see if you’ve got power going that far. If not, I don’t know.
If power is getting to the motor, it should lock up when you turn it on.
if you want to test wires just hook a multi meter up to each end and flick it onto the continuity meter.
“If power is getting to the motor, it should lock up when you turn it on.”
That depends on your grbl settings. “Step Idle Delay”, $1 in v0.9 or $7 in v0.8 determines whether the motors stay locked when they stop and have power applied. For the motors to be locked, the value has to be 255; other values set a delay in ms until the motors release.
@AllenMassey: If your insulated motor wires are still exposed at the motor itself, you could use a small straight pin and one lead of an ohmmeter to poke into the conductor. With the other lead at the gshield or other convenient point, you can check continuity.
Thanks for your help Bill, I have traced the problem to my G shield, when it was loose it damaged the Z and X controllers. I have ordered a new G Shield from Inventables. I was hoping to keep everything working till the new X-Controller was released, but now it looks like I will keep the new G Shield for a while.
I have the same problem with my port. I have tried to disconnect and reconnect the gshield to the Arduino several times with no change! I’m wondering if it’s just a defective gshield???
Thomas are you able to connect the Arduino to the port on the computer?
Yes, when I hook up the Arduino USB to the computer, the port shows up with the name Arduino Uno, so I assume I have communication from the computer to the Arduino. But when I try to connect to easel it can’t find the machine!
Are you entering in the same port in the Easel menu as shows in the control panel? Sometimes windows changes the port on you.
Yes I did enter the same port on easel as is on my computer. I even tried to change the port number on my computer and easel to a different port, From COM4 to COM6, still matching the numbers on my computer and easel, thinking that something might be wrong with that port (COM4) but got the same results!
Did you try uninstalling UGS and trying only Easel? If UGS (or another program) is grabbing the port it won’t work.
There is a Java update that can also help make it work again.
Yes, I tried to connect to Easel before I even installed UGS. I only installed UGS because I couldn’t connect to Easel and I wanted to see if it was Easel that was the problem or if it was something on my machine!
A few things you may want to step through:
Make sure you aren’t running Easel and UGS at the same time.
Double check that the gShield is seated firmly into the proper pin hole in the Arduino
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I have tried to reseat the gshield several times! I could try taking out both PCBs out of the case and connect them to assure that they are connecting correctly! And I have already made sure to start easel without UGS even installed!!
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Ive verified all my pins are properly seated and my COM 3 reccognizes it self as the arduino port yet I cannot send the basic Blink to verify its connectivity and easel never recognizes that it is in com 3
Well you were not suppose to run the blink program in the Arduino Environment!, I found that out from experience also! Running the basic blink actually erases the GRBL program installed in the Arduino that allows it to communicate with the G shield. To verify take the G shield board off of the Arduino and with the USB plugged in, pin 13 will be “blinking” orange. If it is, the blink program installed into the Arduino and the GRBL program is not, you will need to flash the GRBL program back into the Arduino!!
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By the way just to let everyone know, I also fixed my problem! My problem was actually windows 7. It had some issues with registry for my ports so I had to install my windows disk and re download it using the " upgrade" option. After I did that I was able to connect to Easel and Universal G code Sender just fine!!
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Wow, that does not sound like it was easy to solve.