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Hi all! So for the past couple weeks I've had an intermittent problem with layer shifting occurring about an hour into a print. I ruled out mechanical issues, and then checked my stepper motors (all wantai). They're getting blazing hot...too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. I'm guessing that at some point one or more of the motors overheats and starts missing steps...though the drivers don't seem to be getting that hot. I've tried adjusting the current in firmware (smoothieboard) ranging from .5a to 1.5a, no improvement. Any ideas?


EDIT: So I played around with the current settings more, and eventually realized that changing the values actually does nothing at all...no wonder I'm not getting any different results. I'm using an MKS SBASE board, ie a cheap Smoothieboard derivative, so I'm not sure if this is a Smoothie problem, or an SBASE problem...

MOAR EDIT: Solved the damn thing. So smoothieware has the config file which lets you set motor current just like any other setting. It also has a config-override file which stores the setting set through gcode and saved with M500, much like EEPROM. But since I'd never set the motor current through gcode I didn't consider that the override would have it in there already...but it did. Current was set at 2 amps, no wonder the motors were so bloody hot! Then I looked up the gcode for setting current, M907, and the wiki is slightly wrong. It says the syntax is M907 X*** Y*** Z*** E***, with the values in milliamps, but smoothie seems to want the value in amps, so M907 X0.9 Y0.9 Z0.9 for .9a, as opposed to X900 Y900 Z900. That was a lot of headache, but problem solved! XD

Glacian22 wrote:Hi all! So for the past couple weeks I've had an intermittent problem with layer shifting occurring about an hour into a print. I ruled out mechanical issues, and then checked my stepper motors (all wantai). They're getting blazing hot...too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. I'm guessing that at some point one or more of the motors overheats and starts missing steps...though the drivers don't seem to be getting that hot. I've tried adjusting the current in firmware (smoothieboard) ranging from .5a to 1.5a, no improvement. Any ideas?


EDIT: So I played around with the current settings more, and eventually realized that changing the values actually does nothing at all...no wonder I'm not getting any different results. I'm using an MKS SBASE board, ie a cheap Smoothieboard derivative, so I'm not sure if this is a Smoothie problem, or an SBASE problem...

MOAR EDIT: Solved the damn thing. So smoothieware has the config file which lets you set motor current just like any other setting. It also has a config-override file which stores the setting set through gcode and saved with M500, much like EEPROM. But since I'd never set the motor current through gcode I didn't consider that the override would have it in there already...but it did. Current was set at 2 amps, no wonder the motors were so bloody hot! Then I looked up the gcode for setting current, M907, and the wiki is slightly wrong. It says the syntax is M907 X*** Y*** Z*** E***, with the values in milliamps, but smoothie seems to want the value in amps, so M907 X0.9 Y0.9 Z0.9 for .9a, as opposed to X900 Y900 Z900. That was a lot of headache, but problem solved! XD

Thanks for getting back to us with the solution!