One or More of the Motors is Stuck (5.2)

One or More of the Motors is Stuck

Important Note: This article is applicable only to SENSOR based motors.

If a motor gets into the “protection zone”, it may stop responding. If this occurs, the mechanical position is so far out of line that the software locks. To unlock it:

1. Power Off all control boxes
   
   
2. Close Sim Racing Studio and all other applications
   
   
3. Download https://dofreality.com/tools.zip
   
   
4. Unzip all archive contents into any local folder on your PC
   
   
5. Run Tools app - there are no viruses or malware there. You can ignore antivirus warnings. Follow on screen instructions and click the “Start SMC3Utils” Button.
   
   
6. Only if you can’t get previous step to open SMC app without error: Open with notepad file SMC3Utils.ini and set COMM_PORT= to proper COM port number from your Windows Device Manager (see 5.1) Each control box has a specific port number. Test one box at a time. Start/run SMC3Utils.exe. If you are getting error messages about the COM port communication, you haven’t set the port number properly in the previous step.
   
   
7. Select the problematic motor. Most commonly, in the SRS application, the motor will be shown as OFF and the green line on the chart for it is below the blue line.
   
   
8. In the left bottom of the SMC app Out Mode select ‘Motion’ and then switch to ‘Manual’ radio button. Write down current Max Limits and Clip Input values (on the right of the SMC3Utils window) and reduce them to 0. Normal is mentioned in 5.3.20
   
   
9. In SMC3Utils click ‘sine’ and click the small OFF button in the top left hand part of the screen, so it becomes ON. Select the button next to the motor you are adjusting. If you can’t set the motor to ON, zero the motors Clip Input and Max Limit to unlock it as one motor locks all.
   
   
10. Power ON the platform
    
    
11. The motor should move back to normal position. If you want to check the motion, you can select the 'Sine' radio button and see that it moves appropriately.The green line is a reflection of the measured motor position (where it actually is), the blue line is the desired motor position (where it theoretically should be).These will not be perfectly aligned, but should be similar. 
    
    
12. If the motor arm has recalibrated, reset the original Max Limits and Clip Input values (you need to increase Clip first and then Max as max can’t be bigger than Clip) and close SMC3Utils.