Recieving feedback from motors in MAX but no movement

[Adam_Kimberlin]

To whom it may concern,

I am fairly new to using LabVIEW. I am an intern working at MSFC in Huntsville, AL, and I have been asked to get a piece of hardware up and running again. I have a PXI-8176 driven chassis, a PXI-7344 motion controller, and a MID-7604 power drive. My boss told me that the wiring has not been altered since the last time it was used (and worked). However a few months before I got here, someone else loaded LabVIEW 8.5 onto the machine so when I first tried to load MAX and the original .vi, I got all sorts of error codes. I worked through all the obvious bugs and I don't get any error codes anymore. I had to downgrade the version of MAX and NI-Motion I was using because they were not compatible with my controller card. Now however, when I try to run my .vi, everything starts smoothly and works, but when I try to move any of my 3 stepper motors, I get no results. So I went into MAX to see if I could get them to work in a different environment and I encountered something very strange. When I try to run the interactive controls, I get position and velocity feedback but my motors don't move an inch....so what am I missing? I apologize if this is something very trivial, I have never even used LabVIEW until about a month ago. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

-Adam

[Vivek_N]

Hello Adam,

There is a knowledgebase article that could prove useful to you : http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/5455D943E243BCA586256C73000C77F5?OpenDocument

This provides a good summary of what could be going wrong with the wiring between your controller and drive, and you drive and motor.  Please post again if this does not help you out.

[Adam_Kimberlin]

Well I know all the wiring is correct, according to those who used it before me. It has not been changed since then and I have double checked just to make sure.

One thing that has happened since my last post is that every once and a while, when I try the interactive control in MAX, I can get the motor to move but it happens only once every 10 or so attempts which puzzles me. I am trying to find the correct motor parameters from the people that built the motor.  They are yet to email me back.

[Adam_Kimberlin]

Fixed it! As it turns out, it was a wiring problem....kinda.

The way the test is set up. The wiring has to pass through an interchange where it passes into our vacuum chamber. Little did I know, the connections at the interchange invert the 25-pin connection. They had wired it prior to me coming here without the interchange so it was not the proper configuration for what I was looking for. Thats what I get for assuming

Thanks for the help though.