Hey Everyone, lurker and first time poster. I took up the CNC hobby last September, and its been pretty fun...for the most part! After going through two Xpro v5 units - both which ended up with the same Y driver failure (and having Sparks Concepts eventually just start ignoring me), I tried out the BlackBox and immediately got better results. Great results, in fact. Until today. When I started up the CNC, I was met with a weird issue that I can't seem to troubleshoot. Yesterday, it worked great, but for some reason my controller is no longer connecting with my gSender software. The BlackBox is recognized (I believe) but it is hanging on "connecting" during the startup process. Everything else is greyed out, and I can't jog anything. I noted that the motors are locking as usual, but there is a delay of several seconds. In the past, they lock as soon as I hit "connect to machine" Here's some shots, including the hardware manager details. View attachment 57845 Unless I'm missing something, it seems the unit is recognized on its COM 2 port. I have even uninstalled the Intel SOL on the COM 3 port that you can see is listed in gSender (in case it was messing with anything). I checked the unit for any error lights, lose connections, and switched out the USB cable. I can't figure this out. ANY help would be GREATLY appreciated. I hope I'm just making a stupid rookie mistake. Man, I hate to think this would be a 3rd bad controller in 8 months.
com1 and 2 are usually reserved for onboard serial ports with com3 and up (to com254) reserved for removable devices So unlikely to be COM2. Try a different computer, different USB cable, and to eliminate any attached Accesories, test with just the Blackbox and USB cable, everything else unplugged. Short circuits can develop down the line (See section 6.3.1 of docs:blackbox-4x:faq-usb-connection-failed [OpenBuilds Documentation])
Disconnected everything, tried a new USB cable, and computer. Kaboom! It connected without any issues. Re-connected everything else, and its purring like a kitten. Awesome. It is gonna bug me as to why the issue occurred in the first place. But maybe I should just be grateful and just get CNC'ing, haha. The funny part was that my buddy came by today and literally gave me a new computer. What timing. His I.T. work has him ending up with all kinds of supplies after each contract, so he had a couple extra Lenovo ThinkCentre mini pc's. The CNC gods must have arranged that, lol. Peter, thanks again for the direction!
Indeed. Symptoms point to something. If that something was an intermittent short, you came out lucky with it just preventing boot, but next time it could result in permanent damage (section 6.3.1 of the BlackBox Documentation and other warnings on other wiring pages) A good inspection of all wiring and terminals just in case? Plugging and unplugging wiggles things around, perhaps enough to push a wire back into a loose terminal or untwist a bundle, or stop a chaffed wire from touching where it shouldn't
