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I am having some trouble with my stepper motors appearing to jitter. I saw some pretty strange things before I grabbed my camera. I saw one y axis motor move out of step with the other y axis motor (my y axis was out of step by about 2.7mm) when I stopped. I also saw the x axis jumping left and right rapidly on what was supposed to be a straight line. I caught a few of the smaller jumps in the linked video. You can definitely hear the stepper motors taking the unexpected steps.
Checked the stepper connections to the gshield, motors, and panels and did not see anything loose. Pulleys are on tightly with threadloc, and belts are tight.
Turn up the y-axis voltage potentiometer on the grbl/gshield, and verify that the v-wheels/eccentric nuts aren’t too tight. Also you might want to look at some sort of dust collection, or put up some temporary cardboard baffles to keep your rails clean.
One problem I see it all the crap that is on your V wheel on your Y axis. This can cause problems with the wheels getting stuck and causing the 2 sides to get out of sync.
I have recently been having the same issue, but my jitter begins when the spindle spools up at the beginning of the carve. The x and z motors jitter. I have done several cuts without this issue and my machine is clean along with the spools not being too tight. I haven’t tried adjusting the potentiameters because I wasn’t sure that would be the solution and I didn’t want to make things worse. The weird thing is that it only does it when the USB is connected to the computer. When I disconnect the USB and power up the spindle manually it does not jitter at all. Could it be a USB or Arduino issue?
I had a similar issue on mine when the carve required significant changing of directions whilst carving (as opposed to just moving in free space and not against the cut of the material), especially on the x axis.
Things have improved massively now that i have re-checked the V-wheels on the underside of the carriage (the ones with the eccentric nut) as they seemed to be too tight.
