Troubleshooting, part II

Hello and thanks to all who replied to my previous post.

I finally managed to get some movement out of my step motors, so I think I can (probably) rule out my wiring as being a cause of the problem.

I'm using Pacific Scientific step motors, hooked up to Gecko 201A's.

I still couldn't get TurboCNC to make anything respond. Ditto with CNCPro. But, I ran "Stepster" and was able to get it to move, though not very well. Here's what happened:

The motors aren't yet hooked up to anything, they're just sitting on a bench. I ran stepster, set the parameters & pins appropriately and tried moving the X & Y axes. The Y axis would move erratically, going between 60-120 degrees (approximately) in one direction, and somewhat less in the reverse direction. It almost seems like it's being sent too many steps too fast for the motor to react appropriately. The X axis wouldn't rotate at all; I think it took one step in one direction, then one step in the opposite direction when I reversed it, then it wouldn't do anything until I restarted the program. Sometimes though the X axis motor would emit a high pitched sound, almost like something inside the motor was spinning very rapidly, without the shaft moving.

I thought maybe something was wrong with the motor, so I switched the motor I had on the X-axis drive to the Y-axis drive, and vice-versa. I had the same results; what used to be the Y motor was now making that high pitched sound and not moving, and the what used to be the X motor was now moving in the same varying degrees of rotation that the (formerly) Y motor was.

Any ideas what to look for?

Rick



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