Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Hello,
I recently changed over to clearpath servos. I won't add any details as of now but in general I seem to get smother motion with the stock motor profiles rather than the autotune. I know there are a lot of variables involved, but has anyone using clearpaths run them without using autotune? Just curious for now.
Bill

The Clearpath motors right out of the box are tuned with no load, i.e., nothing attached to the shaft. Once you hook it to your machine you need to tune it for your machines specific loads. Without tuning the motor and when you actually start using the motor and applying loads to it it will simply stall or trigger any one of the many alarms because you are now asking it to perform outside it's stock, oem parameters.

Are the motors all hooked to the machine? You may need to run autotune several time to get it dialed in. It's not always one and done.

Interestingly, take my X axis for example. I'm using a SDSK-3432P-ELS. Running through a 10:1 planet box to a 1" helical pinion. X car with spindle is almost 100lbs. I did autotune and was not happy with the motion. overall turns ratio is aprox. 3.176
Went back to unloaded factory profile and is very smooth. No stalling or alarms thrown. I was not aware that you may have to do it a few times. How does that work? Do the autotune sessions actually build upon the previous one?
Bill

To the OP, if you contact Clearpath, they can help you tune it, and can even log into your computer remotely if necessary.

After you auto tune you can even manually fine tune the auto tune if needed. There are a lot of parameters that you can tweak. Without knowing anything about your setup there are many factors that will give you a bad auto tune. Machine harmonics and/or vibration (usually on the hobby aluminum frame machines), using cheap motor couplers, too narrow of a belt on belt reduction machines or simply a bad motor choice for the inertia and or load you are applying to it. Again, lots of factors can effect the auto tune. If any of these are excessive the auto tune algorithm will simply generate a bad tune like what you are seeing. Teknic can work with you on calculation of loads and help you pick the correct motor for your loads. I do not think the auto learns from past tunes. It's smart but not that smart.