Determining stepper motor wiring

[getrolfed]

Hello,

I am in the process of upgrading my controller in an older CamTech RM52 machine. It is currently operational, but limited in what it can do.

It has been suggested that I upgrade to gecko 201X or 203V drives or Kelling. So far I have not purchased anything.

I would like to reuse the existing stepper motors which are VEXTA nema 34 size, 2 phase, 4.7 amp, 1.7 volt. There are six (6) coming out of the motors and all six go into the existing controller.

My concern is that I have no idea of the configuration of the stepper and therefore will not know how to wire in a new controller. I have yet to find any schematics on the stepper motors on-line.

Is there some easy way of determining the configuration of the six wires?

Thank you so much!

Rolf

[doorknob]

Typically a six-wire stepper motor has been designed for use with a unipolar driver.

The gecko and keling drivers that you are looking at are probably all designed to drive 4-wire motors.

To hook up a 6-wire motor to a driver designed to handle 4-wire motors, you will either need to use a half-winding hookup (ignoring one of the "outer" wires of each of the two windings of the motor) or a full-winding hookup (ignoring the "center-tap" wire of each of the windings).

There is a diagram showing both the half-winding hookup and full-winding hookup of a 6-wire motor to a 4-wire driver in the following gecko document (see Figure 9 and Figure 10):

Support

You will need to use a multimeter to figure out which wire is which. By measuring the resistance between the various wires (with the motor completely disconnected from the controller), you should be able to find two groups of three wires each that have a low resistance to each other, but an extremely high resistance (infinite) to the other three wires. Within a group of three wires, you should be able to identify the center tap wire and differentiate it from the "outer" two wires by measuring the resistance of all combinations of two of the three wires. The resistance from each outer wire to the center tap wire should be about half of the resistance between the two outer wires. You can then mark them with masking tape (or else make a note of which color wire is which).