Spindle Startup Fail

Yes - had exatly that same problem on my HF350. See my post in "Accessories" on 14th Nov.

I've had no further reply back from Rory yet, so I assume Stepcraft have ignored his enquiry for the time being.

In the short term I have worked around the problem by inserting a 5 second delay after the M03 command - this gives plenty of time to reach the J.C. button if the startup fails. I don't think there is anything in the profile that can affect this behavior as far as I can tell.

Once the stop is removed and the system reset, I set the programme on the next instruction after the delay, start the spindle from the screen button and, if all is well, then restart the cycle.

I have also had similar problem on my HF500. This has happened so often that my checklist now includes steps that start cycle, verify that the spindle starts while keeping mouse over reset button, and when I hear it to start then I let go of mouse.

Also when this happens once on the job, it will happen every single time until I reset the stepcraft itself. Restarting UCCNC or powercycling the HF500 spindle controller does not fix the issue. I can still start the HF by pressing the button on the spindle controller, so I usually just then manually start spindle and finish the part that way.

Hmm... looking at my logs this happened 3 times earlier for the same weekend, but haven't happened since, so it might be that the issue disapperared. Anyways I did raise the delay after the spindle start to 5 seconds just to give me more time.

If you have to cycle the power on the Stepcraft before things return to normal, then your problem seems to be subtly different to the one that Remotruker and I have experienced. Maybe your pwm frequency is different or the percentages for minimum and maximum speeds are different.

On my system anyway, the fault seems to appear quite at random - and does not seem to be affected by the eventual final speed demand. From this I suspect that the problem is with the initial acceleration phase of the startup.

I can promote the fault by continually starting and stopping the spindle via the on-screen button - it seems to fail once every 5 - 10 start attempts.

Thanks for the responses all... Just so to cover all the bases, here are my spindle settings

I see some settings under acceleration steps- I know with VFDs if you accelerate too quickly it can shut down a drive and you have to ramp up the speed up slower. Similar?

Seems Stepcraft has some work to do here. I know it is a hobby grade machine, but for $2+k, I'm disappointed in the quality control. Missing parts, mis-shipped parts, wrong config CD, Spindle issues...

I can't say I would highly recommend this to a friend.

My machine doesn't need to be power cycled, just re-start the file and it has always worked on the second attempt.

For what it's worth here is my HF350 configuration.

The settings were chosen to get the best correlation between UCCNC speed demand and measured no load speed.

On my spindle the minimum speed is approximately 6000rpm, which is the minimum speed setting in the config. The pwm frequency affected linearity, too high and there was very poor speed correlation, too low and the speed hunts about a nominal setting. Rock and a hard place scenario!!