Well, I brought my controller and computer out into the garage, hooked them up to the motors. Then, while I was manually moving the motors one at a time from the computer's keyboard to make sure the motors were plugged in to the correct axes, the motor I was running stuttered a bit, then the DC power went out.
When I troubleshot it, I found that the DC power supply comes up to its peak output voltage then shuts down practically immediately. Because there's no load (everything's disconnected) it takes 30 seconds or so for the voltage to bleed off to zero. The power supply's LED stays lit, but the output is shut down.
Just for point of reference, I ran the motors pretty extensively on my desktop before hooking the up to the leadscrews. I ran them through a couple of programs, no problems.
Now they're on the leadscrews driving the slides. There's no spindle, and no binding on the axes. I can turn the motors easily by hand.
The power supply is a Keling KL-350-48. I thought it was unregulated when I got it, but a look at the link at the top of the Keling power supply page (
http://kelinginc.net/Listofpower.pdf) has it listed as regulated.
So, a wild guess based on my experience repairing power supplies is that maybe the motor+leadscrew generated back-EMF which blew the regulation of the power supply?
The motors are presently wired series bipolar. Would a change to parallel bipolar (or unipolar) help prevent this problem (whatever it is)?
Also, I've got a 24VDC 10A supply on hand. I'm thinking of using this until I sort out the other supply. It's within the 4 to 20x voltage range for my motors, does this sound reasonable, and if so what steps can I take to reduce the chances of a repeat performance with this power supply if I wire it up? Or should I look at a different supply setup?
TIA
-Mark