spinning motors (TERM. 10)

[Verboten]

Hello all!

These things do work!

I got my steppers a steppin' today with my G201 and the TurboCNC demo!

I realize that I might not have been the first... , but I'm not going to let that take away from my accomplishment.

At the risk of seeming silly, I'd like to share something that frustrated me (needlessly) today (for about 1/2 hr.).

It seems somewhat simple now that I've "figured it out", but the directions in my G201 REV-5 installation notes for terminal 10 were not clear to *me* (not necessarily others).

I've had my geckos for a couple months, and have not seriously tried to hook them up until today. - This was because I did not have my shop computer set up with DOS. In the meantime I tried to pay attention to others who were setting them up in their own "special" way - This only led to confusion.

Combine this confusion with " Term 10 is the common anode connection for the opto isolatiors and must be connected to the +5 VDC supply of your indexer or pulse generator."

- I'm sure this explains a lot to some, but it certainly could not be as clear as "find a +5V connection from your computer's power supply and connect it to terminal 10."

I realize that I've not figured this all out as of yet, and that others may use different "indexers or pulse generators" than their PC, but I wanted to share my experience.

I finally got the "spark" that I needed from a thread in this forum from about a month ago - it still wasn't that clear.

Thanks - and sorry about the novel,
Jason

[Mariss Freimanis]

Jason,

Sorry about that. Most (>80%) of our drives go to OEMs and are driven by imbedded controllers. For that reason our manuals cannot be made PC specific.

Mariss

[balsaman]

Mariss,

I love your drives. I use the 320's. While I figured out pretty early (but I have an electrical background, most don't) that the +5 needed to be from the PC powersupply, I too figured the manual could be better in that respect.

Oh, and while on the manual, I think there is a resistor missing in the drawing on page 4 (gecko320 err/res circuit) between the transistor base and the momentary start/stop switch.

Other than that great manual and product! Sorry to hijack the thread!

Eric

[Verboten]

I am also very pleased with the drives.

Overall, they were very easy to hook up and have working - that could be what made the one difficulty that I had stick out. I was trying to make it much more complicated than it actually was. Which does not seem to be that uncommon with these things.


Now that I have them workng what is a good way to mount them?

I was wondering if I could just use a piece of thermal tape cut to size. It seems like neat stuff, but would they come loose when they warmed up?

Any thoughts on this?

[HomeCNC]

Yes! Thumbs up to the Gecko drives. I use the G320 exclusively.

[balsaman]

They are made so a pentium fan clips right on the back. Also the terminal strip comes off so you can get at the screw slots. I just bolted mine to the panel, and they are staying cool. My motors only use 1.1 at full load.

Eric

[Quasi]

Could you not also use the 'high' logic from one of the parallel pins like 14,16 or 17? use it as an 'enable' of sorts?