My shop has been having some trouble with the Z axis on our Trotec 500. This has stumped me, my boss who has a phD in engineering and the techs up in Ypsilanti. A few weeks ago the bed would just rise up at start up instead of dropping down and going through the initialization routine. We updated the firmware, swapped the Z driver boards. Easy, breezy, done and fixed. Not so fast.
After a few weeks happily running jobs we had the exact same problem with the bed rising. We did the usual firmware updates and trouble shooting, then we got really aggressive. We switched the Z and Y plugs in the I/O board. Next we checked the cord from the I/O board to the Z driver boards with a multimeter- nothing wrong there. We used an external power supply to raise and lower the bed. We monitored the encoder to the Z motor. I checked back with the techs, and we disconnected the auto focus from the I/O board. We also checked the keypad that lets the user move the bed up and down and move the head around. Nothing.
All signs point back to Z driver boards, so they're sending us more. It just seems like there might be something that is causing this that we're all missing here. The techs told me that the power supply is on the Z driver boards so it's not getting fried from that. Any thoughts?