My other drive showed up today that I ordered to evaluate. I tested it out. It seems legit to me. I will be ordering more of these to upgrade my machine with.
The other drive is OK. I think this one is a bit nicer though. The heatsink is bigger. It has an IC on it that more resembles an actual TB6600. There is a potentiometer to adjust the current with. Even the control signal terminals are better thought out. Plus it is even cheaper than the other drive is.
So what’s not to like? There is the one mystery switch on the far right of the DIP that I cannot figure out what it is for? I thought it might have been for the torque current output. But probing that pin, and flipping the switch has no measurable effect.
sometimes those switches do exactly nothing
4 Pin DIP-switches are mainstream and cheaper than special 3 pin. So I think you don’t have to worry about that …
@EselDompteur
There are some Chinese characters by that switch. I can’t be sure, but it seems to say more than Not Connected to me. But yeah, I’m not too worried about it. As I said flipping it has no apparent effect. It has to be for the torque control. There is continuity up to that lead. I measured about 8.5K to there. But on, or off, it does not change the logic. I actually did something like that with the motor drives I made. I brought reset out to my DIP array, but I liked how it worked so little I just jumped the switch out. So even if the switch was switched, reset would never be enabled.
@Paul_Frederick I just ordered 4 of these to put on my machine. They were pretty cheap ($8 USD each) so I went ahead and took a gamble. I’d be interested in hearing more of your findings.
@Zach_Hipps
For me to be more definitive I’d have to run them on my machine right now. But from what I’ve seen so far they’re a go for me. I am ordering enough to upgrade with myself. That, and a new PSU, to take advantage of the increased performance of them. I have a nice circuit to knock the high input voltage down to logic level. Which these drives need. I have to build a permanent version of that here though.
One thing I can’t figure out is why they have 32V printed on them? A real TB6600 should be able to handle 45V input. Now that’s not saying these boards have real Toshiba chips on them. Like I said, it is something I can’t quite grasp at the moment.
@HobbyCNC yeah for the price I do not expect a whole lot. I am not disappointed with this drive either. In fact I think it performs great. The other different drive I got works pretty good too. But if someone needs something better then they need to go get that instead.
Just for the record, I didn’t say they wouldn’t work. I was just pointing out that to lower the cost, they removed (among other things):
a) quality components
b) quality manufacturing
c) product support
It may run forever, it may run for a week. One annoying failure and they aren’t so attractive any more. Just sayin’ . . .
