I had some troubles with this too, it was the seating of the arduino, I think 98% of these type of issues come from the board not being properly seated. It took me a LOT of tries to get it right. I could press on the board and it would work. Then lights would go on and off, or one axis wouldn’t respond. It was difficult. But after a lot of attempts, i got it! I screwed that cover on and never looked at it again.
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@ClausArnold
If you have homing enabled and soft limits enabled, the machine powers up in an alarm state. Normally you would use the homing sequence to home the machine and clear the alarm. At that point with soft limits enabled the machine will not use the switches anymore.
This has advantages and disadvatages.
For your testing without being able to home the machine, also turn on hard limits ($21=1). This will cause the machine to monitor the swtiches again. This will help protect your switches and it will cause an alarm if you press a switch.
One thing you should watch for is electrical noise which can cause false triggers on the switches.
All of this is to help you test a little while you wait for your new gShield. In normal operation, I recommend homing and useing soft limits with hard limits turned off.
Also see:
I am glad you stepped up LarryM as I was starting to get out of my depth,
I dont have a running machine yet, I am still assembling the gantry, I am building a DIY CNC and thought this was an OK forum. I will probably start on the Z-axis Saturday and I hope to switch on Sunday or Monday.
regard Neal
Good luck with your machine. Are you going to use Arduino/gShield electronics?
Yes LarryM I am using a Arduino Uno and a gShield from Synthetos, I have a few ideas for bells and whistles that I wanna air later on the forum, but I wanna progress with my machine first.
I have started one thread where I want to follow the temperatures of the motors using an Arduino mega, 3 Nokia 5110 screens and 3 DS18B20 heat sensors, 1 for each axis.
regards Neal
Hello Larry,
now i have from inventables a new gshield, the green led is now working.
but the z-axis not.
i have now changed the whirring between X an Z. and there is the z-axis working.
have you any idea what this is?
sometimes ist seems that the arduino is not repeating, than i reconnect the usb-cable and the steppers are alive…
Let me catch up on this. Is this your current situation?
When you first power up the machine, both USB cable plugged in and 24 volt power supply turned on:
You have the blue LED lit on the gShield.
You have three green LEDs lit on the gShield.
X and Y axis work.
Z axis does not work.
Is this correct?
Yes, thats right.
When i open easel, and go to Machine Configuration, sometimes it hang up with the message “Configuartion Z-Axis for ACME”.
But when i reload sometimes it works.
If you hook the X axis motor wires to the Z axis location on the gShield, does the X axis motor work there?
Do you have a voltmeter / know how to use one?
Dear Larry,
when i change the wirering alyas the motor who is pluged in the z-axis this don’t work.
I measure with a voltmeter. no Voltage is there.
Now i have reflashed the arduino. With the same result.
my godson scored an Arduino to birthday, so he gave me this kindly that i can test it. I have the grbl software flashed and put all thogether. With this arduiono it works.
This means also, that the Arduiono Digitalport is not working correctly.
can it be that a broken gshield broken also an Arduino?
Hard to say what could have happened. It appears that the digital ports that control the Z motor weren’t working.
Glad to hear that you have your machine working.
Nice 
My Z-axis died today 
I do not know what did it. The Chip is cold. GShield v5b. Could I have damaged the chip or blew a fuse (are there any fuses on the board?). Looks like the project I’ve been working on forever will never get done I keep running into bugs and I’m nearly ready to give up on this whole hobby. It’s just runs me up a wall. I haven’t had a successful project in over 6 months. I guess it doesn’t help that all my machine times are 5-10 hours to complete.
