AM882 works with Protune - but not with the ZPA5-INT BOB

[badgerman]

I forgot to respond to you Jazz, apologies (rude when you are trying to help!)

Your not trying to run this with a Laptop are you.?

Nope.

Where did you get the PP cable.? . . It must be a straight thru cable not an old printer or serial cable.

The cable came from one of those chinese TB6500 boards that was included in a 3D printer I bough ages ago. I wonder if that one is a bit special??

Regards the motor tuning then that's nothing to do with Drive settings it's the control software sending out pulse's and if you motor tuning is set to high you could be getting stalling motors.?

The AM882 detects stalls - well it has when I have wound them up to fast in pro tune - red light comes on and it stops ( I might have been trying to see how fast they'd go. . . ). Anyway they are all happy in pro tune and when I connected my parallel port directly to the driver so its not that.

This will most likely turn out to be something simple like dodgy wire or wrong settings. Would be very unlikely you'll have electrical noise issues. The drives clearly work fine has do motors so they are ok and wired correct.

Yeah, I thought it might be noise, but it does the same in and out of the case and in different orientations too. so it isn't because it is in close proximity to power leads (I don't think)

It could be PC related like low voltage parallel port, unfortunately don't know anything about your BOB so unsure if it pulls signals high or not.?

I think the signals are ok as I did a direct connect.

Sorry can't be more help than this.!!

You have been great - I appreciate the input.

EDIT: Oh if your using Mach3 then try the PP driver test to check your PP port.
If still having trouble and can't see any thing else wrong with wires, drives etc then sometimes a reinstall can help. It's not unknown for Mach's XML file to get corrupted and cause daft issues like this.!!

Mach works on my other machine - which uses a ZPA board and GEKKO drives so I don't think its the install. I downloaded the ZPA5-INT xml file from the Zapp site and used that - as described above, the stepper nearly jumped off the table.

I do have one solution to this. . . . control box out the window. Done.