I’m using this board to drive my stepper motors. One of the boards got disconnected from its motor. When I reconnected the plug (I had it powered down) I heard a small zapp and de board is dead now. When I plug it, the red power light comes on for a second and after that it is completely dead. What can be wrong with it. Is it worth fixing? How do I prevent it from happening again?
Do you think you may have reconnected it backwards, sounds like a failsafe mode…
Is that a TB6560AHQ stepper driver IC?
@Paul_Frederick yes it is. Any ideas?
@Mike_B_Scott no that is not possible. The connectors are polarized and it was working fine before.
@Mark_Schouten
Yeah you likely inadvertently disconnected the motor leads while it was energized. That blew the drive IC up. That is a problem all stepper drives have. I learned with mine not to even try to change modes while the drive is energized. When you have power to the drive, just use it to drive a stepper motor. Whenever you want to do anything else make extra sure your drive is completely de-energized before you do anything else. You can get away with doing things, but more often than not messing with the drive while it is powered up leads to catastrophic device destruction. So treat the drive like it is nitro glycerine while it is powered up. Don’t mess with it then! The why of this has to do with back EMF. In that voltages in the stepper coils can exceed the input voltage, and potentially the voltage the drive itself can handle.
What voltage, and current ratings do your stepper motors have? Knowing that I can infer their inductance. Or their potential destructive power. Not all stepper motors are created equal after all. Some have a bigger bang than others do.
@Paul_Frederick I’m using this stepper motor http://m.made-in-china.com/product-750921685/3A-4-Leads-2-Phase-NEMA23-270-Ozin.html?nocache=1451371189824&noHF=0&device=android&isForeign=true
It was suggested by someone in the past and it worked will until today. I guess it will be a throw away and replace?
@Paul_Frederick . Can I replace the board that I use with this one. TB6560 3A Driver Board CNC Router Single 1 axes Controller Stepper Motor Drivers
http://s.aliexpress.com/Vnqq6rYn or do I need to replace all 3. Would this be a good time to think about moving to arduino with a grbl shield, or does that solution comes with its own set of troubles?
@Mark_Schouten
You can chop out the drive IC and replace it. But there is no guarantee all of the rest of the components on the board are sound. Those boards are cheap enough that it is hardly worth the bother. I built my TB6560 based stepper drives when they were not available though. I actually published this article about them years later http://www.instructables.com/id/TB6560-Microstepping-Bipolar-Chopper-Stepper-Motor/ I wonder today just how much some of the Chinese drives are based on my design? Because I did float the schematic around the net even before I wrote that article. There were a couple of us working on making decent drives with that IC. It poses some rather unique challenges.
@Mark_Schouten
Wholly crap they’re less than 5 dollars now? If you knew how much work I put into designing, and building the drives I made you’d know how shocked I am right now. Even my drives cost me about $10 a piece to make, and I used some surplus parts. But I have authentic Toshiba ICs and for $4.94 there’s absolutely no way any of the parts on that drive are genuine. I mean not even the resistors. None of it!
The funny thing about TB6560 ICs is there’s no way you can make a generic stepper drive out of them. It is due to how Toshiba designed the current sensing in them. You need to use custom current sense resistors to get maximum performance out of the drive. So all of these ready made drives use a hack to get around that.
@Paul_Frederick do you still sell boards that you make? If so I would prefer to buy them from you. It would be more fair on this way and I’m getting something that is more quality. If not, do you know about a board that others have success with.
@Mark_Schouten
I never sold boards I made. I only made boards for myself because at the time they were not available. But having gone through all of that did teach me a lot about it in vast detail. So I know more about the TB6560 than most folks do. Get a data sheet for the IC. It has all of the gory details inside it. Then focus on how the current sensing works. Because that is what none of the manufactured boards can possibly get right. Toshiba designed that chip for custom tailored installations in products. So the designer would know ahead of time what current motors they were going to be driving, etc. Just flipping the switches to adjust the current drive strength is never going to work. That feature was put in the IC to fine control a motor in operation. With a CNC application you just want to have the right resistors for the motor you’re using, and run at 100% drive strength all the time. Most of those boards have resistors in them that limit the max current to 1 amp anyways. No matter how you flip the switches! So it is all a crock of it really. Typical cheap Chinese trash. They say it is one thing, and it isn’t. Good current sensing resistors can easily be $3 a piece though. Each driver needs two too. So just the right parts cost more than the whole board does. There’s another setting on that drive IC that I remember is pretty critical too. Oh what did Toshiba call it? I’m going to have to look at the data sheet myself to refresh my memory ah yes, decay. You want 100% decay enabled too. Decay is difficult to explain with a bipolar drive the current reverses and decay determines how strong the reversing action is? Something like that. In any event you want all you can get. It doubles the torque.