Just got 4 of these nice pieces of hardware. Lookin forward to mount them in my new rack.
Quite the random step selection. They don’t seem to bother with full wave drive at all either. Unless that chart was made for a 0.9 degree motor? It should be better performance than low end drives. What voltage are you going to run them at?
How much did you pay for them?
@Ezzy_J
A quick Google search of the model number seems to show a range of ~$65-$77 USD for these drives. Although precisely what @Henrik_Larsen paid remains a mystery.
I got the 4 for a total of $285 including freight and import taxes etc. so @Paul_Frederick is right.
I will run them with a supply of 48V DC initially.
I’m looking forward to try them out. I was originally planning a Gecko 540 drive (did get it also), but think this is better if I want to upgrade my motors at a later time.
They will be controlled from a networked Smoothstepper.
@Henrik_Larsen
The greatest concern with power electronics is that the stuff doesn’t burn up on you. Gecko has a reputation for building fairly bulletproof gear. I have chatted a bit with Marris and he seems to me at least, to make an effort to make his hardware reliable. He doesn’t cut corners. Like if he says his drives can handle 80 Volts then he’s using 160 Volt MOSFETS. Just to make damned sure his drives can handle 80V. Because there are transients to consider too. We might not think much about it but a microsecond for electronics is an eternity. In that period of time the magical smoke can come out too.
A lot of other electronics will use absolute peak values as maximum ones. But they’re not exactly the same.
As an experienced electronics engineer i appreciate what you are saying @Paul_Frederick
Very nice hardware.
@Henrik_Larsen
A lot of folks really can’t appreciate some of the more subtle aspects of electronics. Glad to hear that you can. The last I saw of Marris he really seemed to be doing some original research as far as stepper drive technology went. Trying to stay one step ahead of the blossoming competition that was growing up all around him (the cheap far eastern TB6550 boards were beginning to come out back then). I think some of his drives shift sequence modes now depending on the rate they are going? Or at least he was working on something like that. Plus electronic resonance compensation. It was about more than just plug in your motors and they go with him.
Great that he was “one step ahead” @Paul_Frederick - haha.
Correction 4 steps ahead.