Motor trouble

[tigerprinter]

I'm having problems with the x-axis motor on my Creator Pro. I'll start a print, and when it's travelling to the home axes it moves fine. Then at some point during the first layer, it starts jamming/skipping, totally messing up the print as well as losing its position each time it skips. I cancel the print and go to jog mode and find that in +x and -x it is jamming and skipping like crazy. Then I power off the machine and turn it back on, go to jog mode, and the motor is working perfectly fine again. It only gets messed up once I start a print job again and can only be fixed by rebooting the machine.

I've attached a video to show what the jamming/skipping looks like. Has anyone had this problem before? I'm thinking it may be a problem in the electronics controlling this motor as opposed to a mechanical issue inside the motor itself.

[GOC]

- I would have to say your conclusion is right on the money. It would seem your motor driver is either miscommunicating with the stepper motor or your stepper motor isn't functioning correctly.

- If your machine was recently purchased I would contact to see if your under some warranty. Otherwise I'm not sure how your would go about replacing the motor controller/driver, their accessory section doesn't have that component listed as a purchasable item. Their board looks proprietary, so contacting them is your best bet.

[Mjolinor]

Stepper motors do that when they have one wire broken out of the four. It is where I would start, it's the easiest to check.

Just thought I would add that in case you didn't have enough to check looking at the motor and the electronics.

[jfkansas]

Yup, almost always the wire.

[tigerprinter]

But how does that explain that when I reboot the machine, I can jog the x motor just fine?

[jfkansas]

It might make some momentary connection that breaks again when the printer is more active. Cheapest/easiest thing to do is to replace the cable. Steppers are pretty tough but they do fail occasionally.

[tigerprinter]

It's definitely not the wiring. I just tried printing a different object and it worked just fine. Something is super fishy with my software (I posted another thread about it here)--all of a sudden it's having a lot of difficulty processing large .stl files. I think something got messed up in the .x3g that caused the error with the motor because the much smaller .stl object I just printed gave me no problems. Currently updating my Makerbot Desktop to the latest version, will update here if the issue is resolved.

[soofle616]

Smaller object does not rule out the wire. If anything it may point to that being the problem. With a smaller object you're not moving the carriage as far. Less movement could keep the wiring in a position where the break doesn't manifest itself. FWIW when I bought my creator pro it came with an extra x-axis cable which implies that they expect that wire to get damaged at some point.

[tigerprinter]

Sorry I should clarify--the object I was printing wasn't smaller itself (it was roughly the same size as the original I was trying to do), it's that the .stl file of the second object was much smaller. The first object was much more detailed and was about 60 KB, whereas the second object was just a cube and was about 1 KB. The software had a much easier time processing the smaller file.

[WayTooManyHobbies]

I can only see the video at a small size, but it looks like the belt is oscillating. Might something be jamming the carriage or pulleys?