Optical Endstops

Controllers Smoothie
1

Hi…

Newbie here… I’m replacing the controller board of my Felix Printer with a Smoothieboard.

The endstops of the Felix are Optical sensors of this type TCST2103 (unfortunately I cannot post the link to the datasheet here, google does the trick :wink: )

I guess I cannot just connect the 3 wires (5v, GND, SIG) to the smoothie board. I probably need some other parts in between. Can somebody please help me figuring out what I need to do?

Thanks!

Mike

Imported from wikidot

2

Sounds like a pretty basic sensor, you should be able to wire it directly to the Smoothieboard. Only thing is it has two GND outputs, wire both of those to Smoothie’s GND.

3

Hi Arthur,

Thanks for your reply.

So I dismounted the sensor and gave it a closer look… in fact the wires on the “D” and “E” Pin are connected like you said.

Just to clarify, there aren’t any other components it’s just the 4 pins of the sensor hooked up to wires going directly into the Felix Controller board.

D + E -> black wire.
“+” on side together with “E” -> red wire (I’m thinking this should be the IR LED)
“+” on side together with “D” -> yellow wire (guessing that’s the receiver)

So for X min as an example what I’ll do is connect it as follows:

black wire -> GND (blue, middle pin, in the Smoothieboard pinout schematic)
red wire -> 5V (orange)
yellow wire -> x min (P1.24) (green)

I got cautious when i read the warning in the “printer guide” about potentially frying the board and in the search that followed I found a lot of schematics with similar sensors on reprap forum which have some resistors and voltage regulator on a small pcb. I thought it was best to double check if it’s OK to hook it up directly.

Thanks four your help!

Regards,

Mike

4

The endstop connectors provide 5V, and Smoothie’s pins are 5V-tolerant, so pretty much you can’t burn anything here.

5

OK thanks…yeah 5V… i thought as much as well… but since I don’t know I lot about electronics I just wanted to make sure.

I will get to work on it on the weekend… let’s find out…

Thanks for your help!