Brand New Flex motion 6C not working properly

[Himanshu]

We are using a self made servo motor drive with flex motion 6C Card and UMI Flex-6. We have observed erratic behaviour as far as servo motor behaviour is concerned. There are a few questions that I would like to ask:
1. How do I make sure that the card I have is working fine and there are no error in the UMI Flex-6 accessory.
2. Can the settings of the PID controller and other parameters change because of errors in the servo motor drive.
3. Should the settings change overnight.
The bottom line is that I want to make sure that the card is Ok and there is no problem in it.

[Brent_R]

If MAX reports that the controller has initialized successfully, then the controller should be working okay. Once you apply the settings and initialize the controller, the PID settings should not change over time without any user interaction. The PID settings also shoud no change because of any hardware (drive) you attach to the controller, unless you execute the auto tune routine. In this case the gain and current limit settings on the drive can affect the PID gains calculated in the auto tuning process.

To test out the controller and UMI, I would first connect the encoder feedback from the motor. Turn the motor by hand and make sure that the position feedback updates correctly in the 1D interactive. Also, select kill for one of the axes to make sure the inhibits
correctly disable this coressponding axis on the drive. When this is working okay, connect the motor power leads and try to tune the motor. If the motor spins out of control and you can not find suitable PID gains, try reversing the motor leads.

Regards,

Brent R.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments