Does anyone ever use ATM connectors? Amphenol-sine? I was wondering if they are a vast improvement over others.
I use barrier strips. I had them laying around. They’re not fast disconnect or anything like that. But it is not like I’m disconnecting stuff all the time on my CNC machine anyways. I think the case is stronger for connectors in manufactured machines. They have good reasons to use fast connectors.
That’s what I started using. I find them very convenient to swap out motors or machines
@Mark_Leino why do you need to swap out motors?
Well I have a sphinx for cutting thicker aluminum 500x500mm, a wood router table based off an r7, 1000x1500, a plasma table 1500x1500 based off an ox, and another r7. I only have 12 good stepper motors, so sometimes they get moved. I’m always changing up machines to see what works best
@Mark_Leino with so much into machines you can get motors for all of them. Or just get rid of machines that you don’t really need.
Oddly, the motors appear to be working, and all drivers except for the gecko driver. The Nema 23 that I replaced the geared nema 23 appears not to be functioning correctly. I have to check the correct settings for the gecko driver to run. I can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work…I paid enough for it.
@George_Allen we all pay too much before we know what is going on. That’s the price of education.
With any motor drive there’s 3 settings you have to deal with. Current limit, step space (setup time) and the step sequence mode (half stepping, quarter, etc). Some drives have other settings too but those are the three major ones that they all have.
I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down on you but I’d say geared stepper motors on a gantry machine is a bit of a faux pas. Some folks use timing belts and pulleys for a bit of reduction but a gear box? I can’t say as I’ve see that. I know why too. You might want to rethink using geared steppers on your machine at some point. The sooner the better too. That’s going in the total wrong direction.
Have you checked your PSU voltage while your machine was all powered up? I don’t want to ask obvious questions but that’s a basic one there. Don’t assume your power is good. Don’t assume anything. Until you get sorted out everything is suspect. Good power is non trivial to achieve. Until your machine works nothing is proven yet.
@Paul_Frederick Yes, I realized I likely made a mistake with the geared Stepper, but I do need to find out why the gecko driver wouldn’t work. I switched out motors on the X axis to discover that the nema 34 Motor wasn’t the problem. It worked fine when connected to the driver on the x axis, and another of the working motors didn’t work when connected to the gecko driver.
@George_Allen you’re narrowing it down. I was thinking about you last night when I broke out all of my kits and was fooling around with them some. One of those kits included my DSO 150.
@Paul_Frederick I ordered an assembled one a couple of days ago. I emailed the gecko ppl and they said to remove the DIR pin from the driver and see if it still has the same response. He said that would help to determine if it was a damaged H bridge in the driver (which runs those motors in the opposite direction, if you didn’t already know that) or potentially something from the ESS. I discovered a problem I was briefly having with the table axis as I had one of the motors set to 32 KHZ max frequency and the other to like 64 KHZ (I think) and the higher one wouldn’t move, but when I set it to 32 the table axis moved perfectly.
@George_Allen That 64kHz sounds like your period to me. If that’s what it is then dropping your period to the lowest speed you can while still getting the pulse stream you want out of your controller is the best thing to do.
That H bridge stuff doesn’t sound right to me. There’s only one H bridge in a motor drive. Because that’s all you need. Which way a stepper motor runs is determined by the sequence direction. Running top down through the logic table turns the motor one way, and reading bottom up spins it the other way. Step sequencers are basically digital counters where each step in the sequence corresponds to a specific digital state. It is a number system for electronically commutated motors.
Although ideally stepper motors run on a phase shift of sine waves. But in practice that is difficult to achieve. I’ve run a stepper motors on a phase shifted sine wave. Talk about smooth. But there was no way to step the motor. It just ran like an electric motor, except very slowly. I ran it right off wall current. So 60 Hz. I did the phase shift with capacitance. You run one motor coil right off the wall and shift the other coil.
The alligator clips in this picture are just coming right off a line cord plugged into an outlet http://i.imgur.com/L0AMzq8.jpg Talk about gobs of amps of power. I did not have a 14 uF non polar cap capable of handling 120VAC so I made one out of polarized caps. It was tricky to do the math to use the caps I did have kicking around. But I did it.
Don’t try this stunt unless you have a 115V rated stepper motor. That’s the only way it works. A buddy of mine gave me a bunch of stepper motors and there was one in there. I wanted to see it run too. A worthless motor for CNC. Could use it in a Christmas decoration though. I think at 60 Hz it is about 200 RPM? 192 if my math is right. It is like an 800 oz/in motor though. So pretty torquey even if it is a tad slow.
File that one under stupid stepper motor tricks. Another fun thing to do if you have two identical stepper motors is hook them up color to color together with each other then turn the shaft on one. The other motor will turn in sympathy with it like magic. That’s the worlds simplest stepper motor drive. Although there again it is difficult to digitally control.
@Paul_Frederick I went down to the shop, switched out the gecko driver with a TB6600 and the motor works fine.
@Paul_Frederick I’ll have to send the motor back to gecko and have them replace it.
@George_Allen there may not be anything wrong with it. But they’ll be able to tell if there is. So does this mean you’re up and running now?
@Paul_Frederick I should be as soon as I get my motors back on. But I’ll need to use the geared motor for the X until I get a replacement. I need to see if all the motors can push the axes when they are remounted. If they do, then I can actually tune all the motors. And I’ll need to connect the switches and tighten a few things up. If I can get through that without many more conflicts, yes, I’ll be up & running! And not a moment too soon!
@Paul_Frederick I haven’t decided if I need to go ahead and wire all the controller terminals of my spindle to the bob or wait until after everything is wired up and tested.
@George_Allen anything can cause you problems so your best bet is to do one thing at a time then test before proceeding on to something else. It is the long way of doing things but it may save you from being in an I don’t know what is going on situation. Although you cannot definitively know the last thing you did is what caused a problem. But it is still a safe assumption to make initially. It is easy enough to verify at any rate, you simply undo whatever it was that you did and see if the problem goes away. The best strategy is to start running early then keep running all along. A lot of people put their whole machine together and then when it doesn’t work they don’t even know where to begin looking for a problem. If you test as you go you avoid that.