I haven’t seen this Trinamic TRAMS board posted here, so here it is. 4x TMC5130As on an Arduino Mega 2560, retail is $70US. Just testing, nothing serious.
interesting, source?
facepalm those fuses. They should use either short lead pcb fuses or cut those leads. The fuse is supposed to sit on the base, not look like a water tower.
If you use that board, cut those fuses down so nothing happens with them.
Otherwise that seems nice so far. I like the specs. I’d be interested to hear about how it functions in real usage
Haha, yes I’ll cut down the legs on the fuses before I use it. I have never seen fuses like this… Thanks for the tip!
Eagle-eyed viewers may also notice the AUX3 pins are also really badly soldered (by me!), but those aren’t used, so I’m not gonna fix them.
That form of fuse is what I use on custom PCBs in industrial equipment all the time. They’re a good form factor and I’ve never had trouble except once where fuse leads were 1/8" too long, the fuse rocked and the thing kept getting knocked out of its base. Avoid that and youll be fine.
You won’t find spares at Lowes of course, but digikey has plenty. Around $0.35 each, made by schurter.
The link above doesn’t seem to work. http://www.trinamic.com/products/integrated-circuits/evalboards/trams
“TRAMS is shipped with all smd components mounted. THT components are shipped but not mounted.” So were those fuses really delivered that way?
@Jeff_DeMaagd Nope, they were in a ziplock static baggie. It was only the fuses and the pin headers - long and short. As I’d never seen this type of fuses, I just jammed them in there like a neanderthal. thankfully, this helpful community steered me in the right direction.
Also note that I burned one of the endstop connectors. : ) I solder about three times a year.
It seems odd that they solder on the SMD devices only. I get that those are what most hobbyists can’t do themselves, but it seems to me f they’re going that far why not do it all?
Too bad for me my bed heater is 30A. They don’t make a board to handle that, I bet.
I’m still looking to find a motion control system that gives me S curve motion profiles. Trapezoid is nice, but I miss my S curves and my closed loop motor controlss with encoder feedback and all the fancy features on equipment that costs 10-50 times what we spend on our 3D printers.
@David_Simmons 30A is where I’d use an SSR. Printrbot and Sythetos are collaborating on very high order acceleration.
Those features sound good. I hope to hear back on how well it works.
@David_Sherwood ok now I really like it. though I wonder how they do stall detection without an encoder feedback, probably by measuring current and such, which is nice. Most stall detection I’ve seen out there relies on an encoder and that just adds extra cost that you can avoid if you use ingenuity in your electrical engineering.
I think I may be putting this on my list of future upgrades to test and plan.
@Jeff_DeMaagd too true. My printer (ordered as a kit) used a mechanical relay with on/off control instead of PID. The relay was soldered onto the top surface of the heater PCB of course, stupid designers. I always have to watch to make sure my hot end fan or second hot end doesn’t hit that relay when near the end of the print bed.
My new SSR is coming today finally, I was in no real rush. So now I’m just waiting for the backup contactor and overtemp sensor before I change the wiring.
Of course, I feel it may be overkill. I haven’t yet had a way to measure my glass bed’s temperature response and variation. But for my needs the side benefits (no clicking, relay off the board, more flexibility) are worth it anyway.
@David_Sherwood Nice. I like it.
I haven’t got the TRAMS running yet. The Series 1 has twin Y motors, so I’ve swapped the Y and Z in Marlin. Z and X work, but Y does not because there is no Y2 defined in their version of Marlin. Endstops also don’t work, but the X endstop is reporting TRIGGERED, so it may have a short.
The heaters and PID tuning work.
Trinamic has been responsive over email. They’re releasing a new version of Marlin soon (maybe Friday), so that may address these issues.
@David_Sherwood I’ve talked to @Andrew_Rutter about using StallGuard for endstops. He is not enthusiastic. But, please - prove us wrong! : ) Keep us up to date on your progress. I’ll share whatever we figure out.
Based on testing with a different chip that offers StallGuard, the motor needs to be very well matched to give meaningful resolution. Its workable as an endstop, but you need to have a machine designed to withstand the forces. Its doable… with some caveats!
Hi all! We would like to personally thank you all for your interest in TRAMS. We have been receiving some support questions lately and it turns out many of them come from people writing in this thread 
We want to confirm we are working in a new firmware version which facilitates the configuration of the TMC5130 and organizes the code better. We will try to get your feedback from this thread and maybe answer some questions!
Check out our Google+ site for some cool videos e.g. about TRAMS and StallGuard!