Z motor cannot lift

We are so pleased! Today, after months of periodic assembly work too often interrupted by other responsibilities, we were able to communicate with our Farmbot. After troubleshooting and adjustments, we are able to move on the X axis and the Y axis without incident.

We are able to lower on the Z axis, but when we try to raise on the Z axis, the motor tries to rotate but the screw doesn’t turn. I suspect our problem is that there is some kind of resistance that the tiny motor cannot overcome, but I’m not sure how to confirm that or how to address it if that is the problem.

I am able to turn the screw manually to raise the UTM on the Z axis,

Can you provide us some troubleshooting options? Thanks!

If it runs smoothly up and down when you manually rotate the screw it’s probably not an obstruction but needs the Z axis stepper motor controller power setting tweaking. At least that’s how we got ours to work eventually. But they are very delicate and there’s very little guidance out there as to how much to turn the screws to increase/decrease power delivered.

So it’s been a matter of trial and error with us. If that still doesn’t do it, try replacing the driver and quality between drivers seems to vary a little.

Hello @leeborden

first I would recommend you to play with the parameters “max speed” and “accelerate for”.

But this rather sounds like your motor does not receive enough power from its stepper driver. You can adjust the Voltage with a screw on the driver while measuring the voltage.

Luckily we have a great guide that explains how you can adjust your stepper driver. Thanks to @mdingena at this point :slight_smile:

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