Connect Servo Armature

[SignTorch]

With everything turned off, wire the servo motor power wires to the servo drive armature outputs.



On each servo drive, turn the tuning trim pots fully counterclockwise. (per the manual)

My X trim pots are set like this



My Y trim pots are like this



Start by turning your trim pots almost, but not quite, the same amount as shown above. Over-tuning, turning the trim pots more than necessary, is to be avoided because the motor kind of goes crazy. We cannot really tune the trim pots at this time with the belts off.

Start Mach3, turn power on, hit reset in Mach3, set the feedrate to 10 IPM, you can enter F10 in the gcode input box.

Press the reset button on the X servo drive. The IN POS light should come on and stay on. The motor may hum, or oscillate a little when idle, that is normal.

The WARN light should not blink, and the motor should be holding its position.

If it moves, goes crazy, or the WARN light blinks constantly, you can try reducing tuning ever so slightly to get it to settle down.

Now we should be able to jog each motor back and forth and make sure the right axis rotates in the right direction with the arrow keys.

Try referencing each axis and make sure it runs in the right direction and trip the limit to make sure it stops.

Now, we can power down and put the belts back on.

Always turn Mach3 on first, then power the machine, then hit reset in Mach3, then press the reset button on each servo.

Try jogging each axis at 10 IPM. Try referencing home on each axis. Then try gcode G1x10. It should move 10 inches right. Try gcode G1X0 it should go back to zero. Try that on the Y. Then try G0X10 and G0X0. To see how it traverses.

As for fine tuning, it doesn't accomplish anything to crank up the tuning as far as possible, I just try to find a sweet spot where it idles quietest, and that seems to work good. It doesn't seem necessary to tune with an oscilloscope.

Congratulations, you now have a high performance servo driven X/Y axis to work with.

 

[SignTorch]

I can get the servos to move by jogging but they are inconsistent and go to fault very easily, and then refuse to reset.

the behavior you describe is odd, can’t speculate all possibilities without knowing if something is way off with your switch and pot settings, power supply specs, whether it is one motor or both, one controller or multiple, step signal rate, etc

it is very possible for the controller to go bad and simply not work right like that

sometimes you have to try a different controller

if its free spinning with no load that may be a contributing factor

I don’t recall but over-current faults might require power cycle and if so then that might explain why it won't reset

turning current limit trim pot clockwise reduces current limit, lower voltage draws more current, a voltage/current issue could be due to the power supply

dip switch 7 off might help

I can't think of any other potential reason for not resetting

 

[SignTorch]

Thanks for the speedy reply and info.
I'm still getting nowhere fast with this motor setup.
My best settings were pretty much the same as yours but it's still very fickle.
I can get it working (jogging and homing) one moment, then retire for coffee, come back and it'll sulk again.
Currently the encoders do exactly as per the manual - but when I try to jog the motors will just move a fraction and then stop with the red fault light on. Reset to get two greens and repeat. I've tried swapping the encoder A and B, and also the motor pos and neg, but this just makes things worse.
I'm going to try to get hold of either two signal generators or a scope next to do some testing. I know my motion controller is good because I have a stepper on the Z and it works fine.
I'm in the UK so plan to wait until this PM and try calling Geko support.

you did not give power supply specs, or say whether you tried multiple controllers, or disclose pulse rate, so can't speculate.

if the motor holds, especially after one step, then reversing power or encoder won't help

signal gen and scope probably won't help

assuming none of the above is not the cause then probably a bad controller