Thread: Smooth Stepper Dropping out

Mike

I found I needed a good connection between PC chassis and the earth lug on the VFD.

I only had issues when the VFD started. I would run all day if I did not start the spindle.

Didn't get much cut though.

However I am not using the SS. Rod is, so he may know more.

Greg

Hi Mike,
I nearly threw my SS over the back fence at one stage for the same reason you have there. My computer was also connected to a differnt power point to the machine. I connected a wire from the computer case to the frame of the machine and it fixed it immediately.

Greg put me on to it and while I was initially not convinved it would work (seemed like too easy a fix for me) it solved all my problems.
Easy to check if you have a couple of alligator clips and bit of wire - as simple as that.

Make sure you have the latest SS driver as it was updated recenty and much improved on previous version. I can now pull the USB cable and then reconnect and Mach3 does not sieze up. A few other improvments have made it a robust product.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Okay i'm going to common the frame and my PC and see how I go.

See you all in adelaide

Okay guys, the fix suggested made it worse.

Test 1.
I put a wire between the PC chassis and the frame. PC, spindle all connected to same power supply.

Test 2. (fixed issue)
Connected PC to power point 1. Spindle to power point 2 and smooth stepper control box to power point 3.

This EMF issue is such a pain with the SS. The idea of a straight connection to the parallel port sounds nice.

I did notice that the firmware is running on the old version so I will upgrade it tonight and re-test.

Any other ideas?

/M

Hi Mike,
I nearly lost it with my SS but kept plugging away and eventually got there. For me the air pump I use is an electromagnetic piston pump and seemed to be the main cause of noise. I put a filter on that power point and still had problems so ended up enclosing the pump in a metal box - that worked.
Try the new smoothstepper driver as one of the upgrades in the latest version was noise filtering.
His words:
"The debounce filter has been improved. Now its behavior mimics a low-pass filter"

Another thing you could try is a 240 volt filter on the spindle. It seems that changing the power point makes a difference for you so it might work if you run the spindle off a filtered 240 volt point.
Here are what I use

Actually I am not sure if this works for inwards or outwards power or both so maybe you need to filter the driver and computer to stop noise to them through the 240 volts. You will have a better idea than me on that.

You can also play around with noise filtering in the Mach3 smoothstepper plugin. I have all mine set to 5 but now things are stable with the upgraded driver I should go back and reduce those.

Thanks for the ideas Rod, I'll defintly try the driver.

I have a HF filter on the spindle and i just bought another unit which i'll apply to the PC input to see if this can help.