I am new to working on electronics. I have built alot of RC airplanes, wired cars, boats, and houses but I am totally lost when it come to basic electronics and how best to wire them
My first question is are there connectors that I can connect to a pin header that have screw terminals? I soldered the 4 pin headers onto the step and direction holes in the board and the conection from the pins to the wire block doesnt seem very robust. I would like something that I can make connections easily like the green screw terminals on the power connections.
Also, do I need any kind of BOB between the smoothie and the drivers? (I dont think I do but the more I read the more I get confused)
pin header connectors are very reliable and are nearly universally used, just try them and they’ll work just as well as screw terminals ( it’s not useful but if you still have peace of mind issues just add a drop of super glue or something ).
I’m not sure what a BOB is, but you don’t need anything between the smoothie and the drivers other than wiring.
So…How do I tell if I killed the board while soldering my pin headers on?
The bad - While soldering I screwed up a header and heated it up and removed it. Then I had to get rid of the excess solder before putting a new header in. I am sure all of this combined with my lack of decent soldering experience was not good.
The good - When I connect the board to my computer (win7) it sees it as a smoothieboard and gives me a com port. I can also open the microSD card and edit and save things on it.
More bad - When I use UGS or bCNC I can not connect. The bCNC acts like it connected to something but I cant get any info about what it is connected to and I cant get a nema17 stepper motor to spin at all when I try to jog it. I have tried all of the stepper motor connections, and double checked the motor wiring.
I have only used UGS in the past and really like it. It works perfectly for me and would like to continue to use it. I believe that I have loaded the correct config file for a CNC mill and have reloaded it to make sure that it wasnt corrupted at anytime during the soldering and other activities.
I am hoping that there is a way to check the board without having to send it in. The cnc mill guide says to connect and practice talking to the board but Im not sure what that means. I have the windows drivers installed, and I realize that if I killed it I just need to get a new one and intend to, but I dont want to just buy a new board without confirming that this one has been killed. Also, I want to know that I will be able to run the board with UGS.
I intend to use my clearpath motors that say they need a 5v 8mA logic signal minimum and are capable of handling up to 24v. I havent been using them for this testing because they are new to me and I dont want more variables. If I can get regular bipolar steppers to work then I am sure I can make the rest of my machine work (when I get it built)
I hope this rambling makes sense and someone can point me in the right direction.
After reading to try to figure this out and writing my last post I realized that I dont know the difference between the config file and the firmware. Or if there is a difference. Do I need to update the firmware for cnc? or the config file. I have just messed with the config file and dont know about changing the firmware file.
If you can access the SD card, the board is fine, you didn’t break it.
UGS ( despite it’s name ) doesn’t have good support for Smoothie ( even though it’d be trivial for them to fix that ).
for bCNC ( which is more complex that most hosts ) you need to follow the instructions at smoothieware.org/bcnc for it to work right ( latest firmware, several options to set in config ).
I recommend you try accessing and controlling the board with Pronterface, and see if that works ( not forever, just for debugging ), that will tell us if the board is capable of moving or not.