Baldor F391 Series 1 - Odd Failure
Posted: Thu 10 Nov , 2016 9:40 am
Hello,
I recently got both a Novamill and Novaturn for the Edinburgh Hacklab. It is a open-community project trying to encourage people to be makers
However I have a problem.
The Novamill has a peculiar failure; after a short time the Novamill would lose contact with the host computer. This could happen if the machine is left connected to the PC but not moving for a long time and if running a programme it happens a lot sooner - sometimes within seconds.
As a bit of fault finding I swapped the Baldor F391 cards from the Novamill to the Novaturn. Subsequently the Novamill is fine and the Novaturn now has the problem. I've diagnosed the Baldor card is to be faulty
Using a thermal camera on the sick Baldor card I identified the polyfuse near the bridge rectifiers was running hot. I swapped it with another which is now thankfully running cool. However, the problem still exists.
As an experiment I watched the LED display on the controlboard during a very short trial machining run. When the controller drops communication with the PC, the LED display is still visible but is significantly dimmer (about 1/3 brightness of normal). The PC cannot establish communication with the controller anymore.
I then turn the controller on then off a few times and controller springs back to life and the PC syncs, sometimes needing to download the MINT file.
Has anybody got any ideas? I'm really stumped...
Thank you
I recently got both a Novamill and Novaturn for the Edinburgh Hacklab. It is a open-community project trying to encourage people to be makers
However I have a problem.
The Novamill has a peculiar failure; after a short time the Novamill would lose contact with the host computer. This could happen if the machine is left connected to the PC but not moving for a long time and if running a programme it happens a lot sooner - sometimes within seconds.
As a bit of fault finding I swapped the Baldor F391 cards from the Novamill to the Novaturn. Subsequently the Novamill is fine and the Novaturn now has the problem. I've diagnosed the Baldor card is to be faulty
Using a thermal camera on the sick Baldor card I identified the polyfuse near the bridge rectifiers was running hot. I swapped it with another which is now thankfully running cool. However, the problem still exists.
As an experiment I watched the LED display on the controlboard during a very short trial machining run. When the controller drops communication with the PC, the LED display is still visible but is significantly dimmer (about 1/3 brightness of normal). The PC cannot establish communication with the controller anymore.
I then turn the controller on then off a few times and controller springs back to life and the PC syncs, sometimes needing to download the MINT file.
Has anybody got any ideas? I'm really stumped...
Thank you