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Question on drivers Smoked my made in china 4 axis board todayand was looking at buying a replacement. This brought me to the question of how much difference is there in a cheap all in one driver board and using a bob with separate drives for each motor, performance wise? The china board never failed to do what I needed and would still be working if I hadn't mis wired a stepper.
Thanks, kenny
seemed like a good idea at the time
I don't think there is any inherent difference it performance. The difference is that if one driver is blown, you can replace it separately rather than having to replace the entire thing. And some drivers allow you to replace only the drive transistors, which can cost as little as a few dollars. Ahem... for example, the Linistepper driver kit I sell can be repaired for $6 if you fry a drive transistor.
PIC Linear Stepper Motor Controller
Looked at the linisteppers last night but am using 4 wire hybrids so can't use them and not up to soldering parts I cant see. My question arose out of trying to get some probotix 6 wire steppers working with the TB6560 board. They do not seem to want to work with it, stalling. changing direction between starting and stopping the motor even though they should still be going in the same direction etc.
I did try running my 2 x axis steppers on one output from the board and that seems to work well (board is 4 axis with one bad now). So for now I'll just run that way until the new 6560 board comes. Seems strange that the probotix steppers run so bad on the same board that my cnc router runs so well on. Any input as to why would be appreciated. Trying to use those steppers on a new build I'm working on, really need to get them working right.
This is just a guess...Originally Posted by kennl
Some steppers that are designed exclusively for unipolar hook-up may not work well using the whole winding in a bipolar hookup.
If that is the case, then you should be able to use half-windings instead of full windings for your bipolar hookup. For example, instead of ignoring the center tap wire from each winding, you could try using one end wire and the center tap wire from one winding as your "A" winding (use electrical tape to insulate the unused other end wire), and do the same thing on your "B" winding.
To know for sure, you would want a spec sheet that went into detail about the exact phase relationship between the windings, something that is not often seen. Some motors are designed in a way that makes them "universal" so that they can be used either in a unipolar or bipolar hookup, but some other motors seem not to be.
That type of hookup is shown in the figure labeled "6-wire motor, half-winding connected" in the document http://www.hossmachine.info/Gecko%20...r%20basics.pdf. That document recommends using half of the motor's unipolor current rating, however I do not understand that recommendation, because the normal operation of a unipolar motor only energizes half of each winding at a time anyways, so I'm unsure of what to recommend as far as what current setting to use.
I would strongly recommend you stop throwing bad money after bad with those crappy 6560 drivers from China and get a Gecko from geckodrive.com for the 4 wire motors.
This is a hobby for me not a career, they work well for what I use them for and really have no complaints. Have migrated the same motors and 6560 board between 2 routers now with no problems. Driving $40 steppers with a $400 driver kit doesn't make sense to me. Read more on the linistepper drivers and sure wish could find them pre built for the 6 wire steppers.
Thanks for the direction doorknob. That took care of the problem, now where to find reasonably priced 6 wire drivers so I can use these to there full potential?
kenny
Where are you seeing $400? A complete G540 is only $299 and that runs 4 steppers, not just one.
G540 4-Axis Motor Control
The G250X is $60
G250X 10 Microstep Digital Drive
The linisteppers are available only as kits, but they are /very/ well documented and anyone with basic soldering skills and somewhat better organizational skills can build them. My boy, 14 at the time, put one together with a $10 soldering iron and the only help he got from me was reading the resistor color codes as he is red/green color blind. We updated the docs with numerical values so if you can't read the color codes, you can still sort them out with an ohm meter as a result of that, but he didn't find anything else that tripped him up in the documentation. They really are easy to build.
Edit: OK, I see that you are looking for prebuilt drivers, never mind...
I'm not sure whether you are looking for something that you can build from scratch or a kit or something already assembled.Thanks for the direction doorknob. That took care of the problem, now where to find reasonably priced 6 wire drivers so I can use these to there full potential
kenny
If you want to try building a very simple driver designed for unipolar motor hookup, you could look at Easy to build CNC Mill Stepper Motor and Driver circuits. It's a very simple circuit, though, so it only does single-stepping (but not half stepping or microstepping).
The HobbyCNC EZ Driver boards support unipolar motors, but they come as kits that you need to assemble. HobbyCNC | CNC for the desktop machinist and hobbyist.
And there's the Linistepper that James mentioned, of course.
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