Troubleshooting non responsive machine- Mach3/Syil x4

[Doddy]

Can a bolt on the frame be used as ground? If so neither have power (I tested bolt to a known power and it showed its power so I take it as the bolts grounded?)
Just my spindle doesn’t have a middle pin and I think I’ve located this capacitor you speak of but unsure where it’s - is?

Okay, I've looked again at your pictures provided, on this one...



On the Y-Home set of terminals (3 off) there's I think "VCC", "S" and "GND" - with no wires in any. Unscrew the GND terminal post a few turns and put a bit of insulated stranded wire (end stripped) into the terminal and tighten up - this is your ground/0V/whateverIcallit reference point. Wrap the other end of that wire around the meters black probe and insulate that connection - now you're just probing with one hand.

The measurements you've provided from the estop wire make be believe that white is the switch, and the red is the 0v reference. Now that I've realised there's silkscreen printing beneath the terminals you can probably easily verify that.

The one volt measured - surprises me quite a bit, but I'm not convinced that's measured against the correct 0v reference. To drop 4V across the on board pull-up resistors would mean that the logic on board is sinking 2mA into the inputs - feels very wrong.

Okay, from what you've done already - can you reconfirm using the 0v reference from the start of this reply. I do expect that you'll get a more decisive voltage reading on the meter - I'd expect a lot higher than 1V on the white wire / pin 11 as you describe.

Rather than taking images - if you can just rattle off the measured volts - the images are a bit low contrast once they reach the UK :) - also, I guess from what I can see the meter is auto-selecting AC/DC ranges based on it's own determination?, obviously we'd expect DC voltage readings - an AC setting is likely to read 0V even if the pin has a DC voltage on it. I did quickly check - that Fluke looks like a T5-600 which auto-senses AC/DC - not an ideal meter for this but we should get something out of it - but I'm only trusting non-zero voltage readings if the DC indicator is present.