Starting from scratch (again) - need help (apparently a lot)

My 201x I get a clunk when I turn them on also.

When I had mine on a parallel port I had to invert the step pin to get more than gurgling sounds.

So on my 7i96 I hooked them up to the step and dir minus pins.

Thanks for the suggestion, tried reversing one of them with no change. I'm going to swap over to the other drive / motors and try again, maybe this power supply / drive / motor combo just isn't good (but it seems to me this was the same issue I was having back before adding the 7i76 and was using the "real" PS and motors on the lathe
M

Were the drive's enabled? (Are the motors locked or can you turn them by hand when Linuxcnc is running?)

drives are both engaged (need to ground the pin to dis-engage)
Motors don't seem to be "locked" only harder to turn so I don't think the power-supply is enough but at the same time they aren't even trying to turn or make a noise.

Put a scope on the output of the 7i76 and I can see a pulse being sent when I press jog, I didn't get a pulse train but didn't go any further setting the scope to see the full signal

M

The sherline presets should get you something, although not very fast. I think they are all at 20000.

Any chance you have a winding crossed?

1st It is probably a bad idea to try to use the same power supply for the stepper drives and the field power for the 7i76.

2nd what sort of dc power suply is it, and what is it's rating? (6 amp rated steppers are fairly large and will need a pretty good power supply and probably more than 24v to be very useful.)

Todd Zuercher wrote: 1st It is probably a bad idea to try to use the same power supply for the stepper drives and the field power for the 7i76.

2nd what sort of dc power suply is it, and what is it's rating? (6 amp rated steppers are fairly large and will need a pretty good power supply and probably more than 24v to be very useful.)

1.. unfortunately that's all I have to play with, the real machine has separate control and stepper power supplies but for this, all I have is this one.

2.. 24v 10A supply (I'm pretty sure 10a but I'm not with it right now to double check)
The steppers were from some other things I've played with at various times, I may be calculating the amp wrong as it's like 3 per winding so I doubled it for 2

The drives were the original ones from a Tormach 1100 series 1 mill. Research says they were basically clones of the G201 drives

I had this power supply running a xlotex board with a set of small steppers on a small benchtop mill, I'm going to hook those up instead of these to see if it's not just a really bad miss-match of components causing the latest grief.

What I'm really trying to do is get an understanding of how all this has to be setup to work and I can test the various settings (e-stops, limits, coolant, homing, VFD etc. changing scales etc etc etc) on the bench then I'll fell more comfortable taking the "real" parts (203v, power supplies, etc) off of the existing -running- lathe and transferring over to this setup without having the machine down for days/weeks as I try to figure it out on a live machine that I need frequently

I'll try the other board tonight and see where that leads
M

If the motor is 3amp / coil I would think you would set the drive up for 3 amps.

But 3 drives and motors even at 3 amps may be more than that power-supply can handle. (at the half step position the drive would be applying 3amps to both coils of the motor, that would be 18 amps total!)

Have you tried only connecting 1 drive?

I think the geckos want 18 minimum volts.

And on my machine when I had three steppers hooked up even though it was a 60-volt supply it never got above like 45. {A Chinese adjustable unit}.

So it is quite possible you may not have enough voltage

The drives were the original ones from a Tormach 1100 series 1 mill. Research says they were basically clones of the G201 drives

I have a feeling that the Tormach drives are 3 phase