Jordan's Jgro

[tajord]

Originally Posted by Glidergider I'm not an expert. How long can you hold your hand on your motors be experiencing discomfort and pain? Indefinately..then no problem. 5 seconds...then problems. 20 seconds...I don't know. On mine, I can hold indefinately. They get warm, but not hot.

After about 20-30 min of running, about 5 seconds, this can not be good at all, i got to test the vref's again, i was using a surge protector on the driver box, i had some issues with the motors "and router" dying down on me while doing a cut, seemed like some kind of power depletion problem, so i took it off, ran it direct and tried again, no dying down but now the steppers seem to get hotter than they used to, so i'm kinda hoping checking the vref's will tell me i'm a bit over the maximum rated current since that's the only logical assumption that i can come up with, if not "then" i'll be totally puzzled.

[Glidergider]

Jordan,
Go here for more info on motor heat. Someone suggested going to Harbor Freight and buying a digital laser temp gage. They are cheap. Measure your temps.

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...085#post341085
Here's more info on motor temps.
Dave

[tajord]

Well i dug a little and found this dusty old thread amongst all the clutter, my jgro has not been using that much lately as a result of it not having it's own dedicated PC, the former old girl finally choked and keeled over, as a result i have to use the main PC now and then, transferring the tower to and from the machine, not liking it at all, anyways, here's my new found interest, PCB's, here's my first try at it, using the much talked about EAGLE and pcb-gcode, got linux's EMC to work also, tedious sometimes but fun learning these new programs.

My goal being diy stepper driver boards as i have quite a few copier motors about (amongst other things) and if i can learn to drive then i can make me another cnc (or a few, lol), mainly for my new hobby, take a gander:

[tajord]

Clearly the PCB route shows my surface not being as level as it shoud, time for resurfacing, but hey, it feels great seeing all my efforts so far paid of, right now i'm working on a simple 3 axis driver based on the obsolete UCN5804B chip, which i occasionally see around, i love gaining knowledge on how to make things work.

[bisclavret]

Those look like the same unipolar motors I myself scrounged, they work well with the PMinMO 3-axis board I built (http://pminmo.com/3axis/3axis.htm). Of course, I'm driving them at 24v, so I have some big ballast resistors right now. I never got around to building the chopper for them.... <sigh>

[Glidergider]

That looks like lots of fun, cutting PCBs. KEep posting your success.