I have a newish S4 XL and have been getting frequent disconnects lately. I live near Seattle and the air is not dry–today’s humidity is 67%. Yet my machine froze in the middle of a job, and the PC eventually said it was not connected to the CNC. THis has happened several times over the last week or so.
I previously grounded to the X rail and Z assembly, and the wire in the dust hose, and so was stumped. I probed around the machine to see if anything was not grounded and was surprised to find the right Y rail is not grounded. The left Y rail is grounded, as is the aluminum in the bed.
Isn’t the right Y rail supposed to be grounded as part of a standard assembly? And how can the bed be grounded but the right Y rail not be grounded?
Rob’s already covered it, but just for fun:
It’s worth asking how you’re testing for continuity. If you’re touching the smooth face of the rail, there’s a chance you’ll read nothing because the anodization layer is insulating. You should probe a bolt/screw that’s going into the aluminum rail.
And another thing to try (I will freely admit this is superstition) would be to ground the dust hose to something other than the machine. Route the hose wire to an earth ground so that static doesn’t have to go through the board to be dissipated.
When I had issues with “Static” I grounded everything I could think of. “Y”, “X”, “Z”, Router, Table. Ran grounds to a Buss bar with it grounded to two ground rods outside.
Over kill? probably. Soon after I had bad brushes in the router which cost me some fine cherry due to static.
I have had the same issue occasionally. After all the grounding the final fix was to plug the vacuum into a separate outlet from the machine. That corrected the issue
Thanks for the suggestions/tips. I’m checking for continuity on screws threaded into the rails or on threads in the rails. The vacuum is already on a separate circuit from the cnc and router. All ground wires I added are going to a bus bar which is grounded to the household electrical panel.
Keep in mind that not all disconnects are caused by static or lack of grounding. search for disconnects on the forum and read through them and you will find many other reasons for disconnects.
I also noticed that the case around the USB connector on the control board is not grounded. Seems like it should be. Any EEs here that know why it wouldn’t be?
Hi Jeffish. I already tried a second double-shielded USB cable, routed the USB cable away from the power cables, tried the second USB port on the notebook, and tried a different notebook. No success. Is there something else I should try?
EE here, but not the one who did the board. There’s a USB isolator right after that connector to break any ground loops between the computer and the machine. We do not ground the connector because that would potentially create another, negating the point of the isolator.
If you’re still seeing issues after a few days, definitely get in touch with us. Seems like your setup has solid grounding already, but we can work though the issue faster through a video or phone call. Sometimes the root cause is something completely unexpected and those are the kinds of things we can catch directly.
I’d like to take you up on that offer. (I had another disconnect yesterday, even after grounding the right Y rail and getting an anti-static dust hose.)
Do I call 310-504-3637 and then we set up a video call?
