Good afternoon folks. I’ve been trying to search the forum over and keep from posting any questions, but the short story is I cannot get my K40 to do any movements it was working perfectly I’m not sure what changed. In looking at the machine trying to find Loose connections or something out of place I had the machine off and noticed that when I moved the gantry in times past the LED light in the machine would come on now it does not I’m wondering if that is a clue pointing to what the problem is?
If there is no light in the Mini-Gerbil, try checking your power supply. There must be light.
The mini gerbil does light up. It also will fire if I hit the pulse button on the power supply. It simply will not respond to any commands to move whether it be the arrows or the home button.
On the website of Mini-Gerbil is a troubleshooting chart, try if you can find it. Unfortunately I am not in my workshop for 2 days.
Thanks I’ll check it out.
On your screen, it says
Homing
ALARM:9
It choked trying to home. Check your limit switches and connectors.
I appreciate your chiming in Jack. If you can expand any on how I might check these that would be great!
When the machine boots, it is lost. It will attempt to move the axes toward the configured ends of travel. It knows this when the signal on the limit switch goes low.
It can be configured to go high, but I don’t know your machine.
The switch generally pulls a line to ground or a low state. This tells the controller that the limit switch has been reached. It will then back off a certain amount and approach the limit switch again at a much lower speed, giving it better accuracy. It does this on all axes if possible. With a Z axis, it will usually move it out of the way before moving the other axes.
It ‘knows’ how far it should travel to hit the switch. If it exceeds that, it will fault.
First thing to check is the connectors. They are usually ‘low’ cost and only unplug them and plug them back in. That will help with any ‘flaky’ connections that may be an issue.
If that doesn’t fix it, the next step is to check that the switch is operating. An ohm meter will do that or an led to resistor to b+ will also work.
One way to determine if it’s pulled low or high, is the type of switch. If it’s NC (normally closed) it will probably be a high active state and a NO (normally open) will be for the typical pull it low active state.
Hope this helps, let us know… 
That’s a great explanation, Jack. I’m going to chase the connection aspect when I get home, on a side note if I want to replace the connectors, where is a good source to buy them?
I usually buy the same junk that’s on there from Amazon or ebay. Everything is ‘low cost’ so if you spend extra money on half the problem, I don’t think you’re buying much.
If you understand basic electronics you won’t have any issues with this stuff.
So on a whim I unplugged everything from my mini gerbil and plugged it back up to the stock k40 board (which of coarse doesn’t work with lightburn) when i powered it on both x and why moved a short distance. so that lets me know that the motors are good the plugs are good, i’m thinking I need a new board.
You can try to contact “awesome.tech” and hear them if they have a suggestion, I have only good experiences with the service of these people from Downunder.
Thanks , i have a not been in direct contact with them but I have been on the forum. I think I am going to download k40 whisper and if everything works good I will know its the gerbil.
Good luck, from my experience, you probably don’t have a hardware problem, just configuration. Something isn’t setup properly. Seems to have all the signs.
Take care
This is another post I have it may be connected may not.
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