Random stuff, reduction, servo motors, ideas and thoughts

all the paper work and marking on the drive say they can use either AC or DC but no way to tell the difference on the polarity for those connections?

It does not mater which way round you connect them. as they will have a full wave rectifier inside.

i even took the cover off to see if the board itself was marked but no indication there either. this is the problem with China stuff in general the documentation is pretty bad. i does look like they fixed the screen printing misspelling at least the ones i got were corrected there but it would have been nice if they added a plus or minus to the power inputs for the motor connection. or at least had some mention of it not making a difference in the documentation even

on the AC side they are rated for 80V & 100V DC so i figured 70V DC should be safe.

started cutting my frame level and things were fine. came back 2 weeks later and things went south on me with my temporary set up. i had connection issues with it before but was able to sort those out before. this time i was not so lucky. did some swapping around to isolate the issue and 2 of my drives were bad. probably my fault since it was just temporary and not sealed up very good. i started pricing the Gecko drives and for something that is going to get changed over down the road soon i could not see spending close to $300 for two drives. these were so cheap i just got 3 of them to keep things the same. if they work out well they will end up on my lathe at some point. 10 or 15 years ago cheap drives to handle 6A motors were not around and gecko was one of the cheaper solutions back then.

seen these fit the bill and were only like $48 each so i figured what the hell since shipping was free with amazon since i have prime I have the next 6 days off from work and did not want to be dead in the water so this was a very quick buy and i just looked over the basics and missed the fine details

so thank you everyone for the help you guys are great on here

yeah with the Gecko drives i was getting over 400 IPM on a direct drive ball screw on my Z axis which is around 50 or 60 LBS, so with the ball screw only being a 5mm pitch that means i was getting better than 2000 RPM from a stepper lifting a head on a Z axis. i was impressed with how fast these 34 frame motors could spin without stalling under load.

would appear than i have a power supply snag? for some reason it's putting out 84V? and i can only get it to measure than at the screw terminals even though i have good connections? very odd and i'm am baffled.

i have a brand new 48V supply and i hooked it up and the drives power up just fine with that supply.

only thing i can think of with the 70V supply is the green screw in terminals had a bad solder connection to the board and i have to fix it. maybe something is wacky with the terminal block?

but i'm still not sure why the voltage is over 70V ?

this would be a good example of why i hate electronics looks like i'm down to 48V

the more i think about it the more i think i should have one of these on each motor and drive. i have no idea what the actual current draw is so since these are big motors with a peak current of around 6,3 amps, so based on that i would need something rated for around 15 amps to use a single power supply.

the 70V supply was only rated for 5 amps so i might have killed it by being electronically challenged turns out i was probably maxed out with the little motors on my lathe to run 3 from one supply.

school of hard knocks is expensive it seems the semi good news is these 48V supplies are a lot cheaper than the other one and even having 3 of them is still half the cost of what one of the other ones cost.

I got a few more power supplies and some other odds and ends to at least do a decent control box so i don't have issues again from my laziness

this box is on the small side and i had to get creative to fit all this crap inside but at least it's sealed and all in a happy little home

this cheap parallel port break out board has zero documentation but seems simple enough to figure out for the control logic wiring. i might have to add a 5V power supply to this depending on this computer? the 5V comes from a USB connection but some computers don't quite put out 5V and if that's the case i think i have just enough room to add one if need be?

so as of now i have the main power end hooked up so i will work on the 5V logic side of wiring it next.