Alright, I’m really perplexed. My shapeoko 3 xxl was running perfectly. I had just finished a 3d carving successfully and went to start another job. I realized after starting the job that I forgot the correct Datum so I pushed pause on Carbide Motion. Then I clicked the stop button. Nothing happened. I waited several minutes and it would not let me stop the job. The spindle just sat there in it’s pause state. I reset the machine figuring that it would need to be initialized and rehomed.
What happened was as soon as I turned the machine back on the Z axis traveled all the way down and pushed the bit about 3/4 in into my workpiece and kept trying to push down. It lifted my HDZ almost completely off the gantry and knocked the eccentric nuts loose. I hit the emergency stop as soon as soon as I could but it all happened in less than 2 seconds.
The bit was stuck so far in the piece I had to work to get it out. I retighted the eccentric nuts, manually raised the HDZ by hand turning the ballscrew bar. Then I went to restart and rehome the machine.
The Z travels down about an inch and then it throws me error codes. Homing Cycle failed, GRBL error:Homing failed, pull off didn’t clear. Limit Switch error Z
I have no idea why the switch would fail between jobs when it was not even triggered after a successful job.
This was my first night using the newest release of CM.
I know the Z isn’t wired incorrectly because it had been previously working correctly for months. Why would the Z travel down when homing is started instead of traveling up? I’m perplexed. Thanks for any help or suggestions you can offer.
It is seeing your switch as pressed, so it is in the pull-off part of homing. Check your switch and its connections. That’s where the problem is.
If you can open the log and copy/paste some of it here, it might tell us more.
It’s a bit cumbersome to work with, but just try to grab some lines that look like this: <Idle|MPos:0.000,0.000,0.000|FS:0.0,0>
Yours won’t look EXACTLY like that as you’ll be in an ALARM state.
Okay I turned the machine on and saw a blue light on the board over by the limit switches. I pressed the Z switch and nothing happened. I pressed the X limit switch and another blue light came on. I pulled the Z limit switch connector off the circuit and the blue light went off. I then restarted the homing process with the switch disconnected and the Z started traveling up like it should. I shut it down before it could reach the top.
I’m guessing that narrows it down pretty well to the Z limit switch. I tried to copy and post the log here but its’ so long it wouldn’t let me. Lol.
I don’t know if Carbide has changed supplier for the limit switches and/or wiring recently but we appear to have a lot more issues related to those being posted here in the past few weeks.
This may not be the right location for this, but I just got done installing my HDZ and installed the latest version of Carbide Create. Followed instructions and when I went to initialize the Z went down instead of up. One more thing, JOG is not shown at the top of Carbide Motion.
Yep same thing that happened to a couple of us in the last week or 2, and the z limit switch had failed. I’m not sure if there is something going on here that wake need to do to help avoid this? My limit switch was an original with the white and black wires, so I’ve had it for a few years.
Make sure that the machine isn’t on the Z-axis switch when powering up — if that’s not the case, make sure you’ve checked the HDZ checkbox when sending the configuration — if you have, your machine may be miswired — all wiring extensions should be straight through, and all wiring connectors should be consistent, stepper motors may be reversed in several ways:
swap the left and right pair of wires
reverse the ordering of the wires in the left or the right pair