Mystery hardware

One of the motors is not working properly. It was the first I tested with and maybe I broke it or it is the reason I thought nothing worked to begin with

You may just want to check your wiring on this motor. There is not a lot to break outer than burning out the winding(s).
Use your meter and check the resistance of the windings as to how it compares with the good motors.
Check to make sure nothing is open. And that all the wiring is the same.
If you have a motor completely disconnected from the driver...
With all wires disconnected it should turn easy by hand, you will feel the detents.
Take one set of your wires and short them together, it should be difficult to turn, that coil seems O.K.
Disconect that set and move on to the next and short them together....
If that test O.K. and there are no shorts to ground the motor may be O.K. the above is what I use for 4 wire steppers. Similar 8 wires

How many wires do your steppers have? If more than 4 are they wired parallel, series, etc.?

ts a real pain if I have to try and find a new matching one since I know nothing about these motors. So I might be forced to by a new kit anyway

Except for the set that is working as master/slave it does not have to match, just be in the range of your drivers.

So how do I make the A axis a "slave" to the Y?
I know there is a gantry sample config, but how do I merge it with my settings from stepconf?

There are several way and if you do not need to home both sides of the gantry seperately you can just combine the signals in your config. using a simple edit in the hal file.

Here is a similar tread, there are a few as this comes up quite often...
www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/compo...iew&catid=10&id=3262
On my large router I just combined the signals in hal.

Rick G

Thanks for the tip Rick. I was already doing it Just as my phoned dinged with your response I had the motor working like the others. But thanks anyway.


I have just tried mapping the y to two of the motors in the hal. Will do without homing for now.

It works! I will shoot a video of the motors running the demo in on my desk. I think they are making a little more noise that others I have seen on youtube so if you hear them, maybe you can make some sense of it all.

It will be an hour or so, it takes forever to upload anything here.

Great to hear you are up and running.
Beer is good.
Will look at video tomorrow, steppers do vibrate, you can try changing the microstep setting, finer micro steps can sometimes help, but remember if you do to change the Scale, and depending on your latency may reduce your top speed.

Good luck,

Rick G

And here is the promised video.

The sound is a little low, so turn it up a notch

I expected some noise from steppers, but the stuttering when they are moving slowly is not something I have heard before in the countless videos I have watched with great envy.

I will try to make some small adjustments, but any input is welcome as I am fumbling a bit still

You might want to look here...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_motor

It is very common to have a fair amount of vibration in a stepper at a particular low rpm. They do sound better when bolted down, and sometimes finer micro steps will help.
If you think of them not really spinning like a regular motor but going from one step, stopping and then going to the next step the vibration makes sense, and yes some motor driver combinations are smoother than others. Some have adjustment to help with this.
I try to set my drive ratio so that you are not working in the worst rpm area.

Rick G