Random clearpath drive faults while operating

[bphillip2]

FYI I have two C86ACCP boards with no need for them here. One is an older non-screw, the other bought just months ago.

[Gary Campbell]

The path to solving these types of problems lie in the log reports and, should a drive fault occur, verify that a motor did in fact fault and reading from that motors blink codes (or MSP software connection) to verify what caused the motor fault. Of course you must then rectify the issue that caused the fault.

The fact that you have erroneous Y limit triggers may mean that you have EMI in the system and may be introducing erroneous steps or triggering the alarms when there is no motor fault

[johannes]

One thing to keep in mind when you let Acorn soft enable the drives is the risk of an axis moving while unpowered.
As Gary suggested, if you have a gantry that is auto-squared it could slide back out of square when the drives disable.
I found that Acorn was disabling and enabling the drives far too often for my liking and comfort.
On my large router (dual Y gantry) I ended up keeping the C86 board to simplify wiring and to hard enable the drives all the time to avoid this.

[bphillip2]

Hello Gary. I changed to clearpath and a C86 about 3 years ago on Keith suggestion as he said steppers were not for real manufacturing. I'd have to say the clearpath/c86 combo has been far less reliable than Geko and Steppers were before. The only way I got anything done was to disable the HLFB monitoring. Recently trying to use HLFB after the rebuild caused the same drive faults. I'm hoping I'm past that now.

I never saw any indications that the clearpath motors ever actually faulted. CNC12 simply reported a drive fault and stopped the program, but that removes power from the motors like an estop. Sometimes CNC12 said operated aborted and stopped. I finally took the entire electronic enclusure apart, bought a new acorn, 2nd c86 and added ether16. Re-wired everthing with great care towards emi and full labeling every wire. The result was a machine I could do nothing with. I think I ran one program without a drive fault. After endless trouble shooting I came here. C86 removed and now I'm up and running. I can't say for certain why, but I'm back to work.

The Y faults Keith saw happended before the machine ever moved an inch after the c86 removal. I never saw them in real time. I was just rebooting and testing.

As for homing, if I have an error or crash I re-home because the 72 inch gantry would need to be re-squared. I'm not seeing an other times the drives would disable.

[Gary Campbell]

Hello Gary. I changed to clearpath and a C86 about 3 years ago on Keith suggestion as he said steppers were not for real manufacturing. I'd have to say the clearpath/c86 combo has been far less reliable than Geko and Steppers were before. The only way I got anything done was to disable the HLFB monitoring.

I dont mean to be overly blunt, but you must have something wired wrong, have the system improperly configured, do not have the servos tuned properly, or have some unfound EMI gremlin causing your issues. I have close to 50 Acorn4/AcornSIX ClearPath control systems running out there without issues. When connected properly, and I do use the C86ACCP interface board on all of the Acorn4 systems, they have proven to be bulletproof.

[ShawnM]

You can also hard enable the drives without a c86 board. I do this on my z axis on my plasma table as there is no servo brake on the axis. If the motor does fault you’ll get a blink code on the back of the motor. If it’s solid amber/orange then the motor didn’t actually fault and you have a noise issue somewhere. You can monitor the motor in real time with the MSP software running on a laptop while using the machine.

[cnckeith]

hello.
don't run g code programs at 200% feedrate override.

change the G code program (easy search and replace with notepadd ++), change the programmed feedrate if you want to run faster! always run jobs at 100% or LOWER for best results.