Stepper wiring/colour coding

[EddyCurrent]

One of the most important points for quality production is repeatability, clearly they are unaware of such things where these motors are produced.

[rwb97]

Righty... So I've finally got round to getting a PCIe-parallel card, and have been playing around for most of yesterday trying to get this to work.

I started by checking that my power supply was outputting actually 24v, not 30v which if the potentiometer has been moved it can do, then wired the steppers up to my driver board (I'm using a 4 axis TB 6560, but currently only 3 motors)(I don't yet have any E-stops or limit switches or spindles, I'm just trying to get the steppers to work) like so:




Is this right? I've tried to show how I've set my DIP switches too, if it helps I can attach the entire data sheet for the driver board.

I then installed the drivers for my PCIe-parallel card, then Mach 3, and then plugged the power, steppers and parallel into the board and turned it all on. I launched Mach 3 mill, went to ports and pins and set it up how the driver boards manual says to, loaded some g-code and hit start cycle. None of the motors did anything, so I tried using the jog hotkeys. still nothing.

I then tried browsing some youtube vids, forum posts etc, (one of the reasons I chose this board was that it seemed popular and so would be easy to find other people with it) and found some different ports & pins settings which I tried. Still nothing.

The only things I have noticed are that the fan comes on on the driver board, it doesn't get at all hot (slightly warm) after 15 mins, the two LED's that I have highlighted in red boxes on my diagram come on (I think they are the 5v and 12v regulator LED's), the motors are no easier/harder to turn than when they aren't plugged in, and lastly I think there is a very faint rice crispies sort of crackle noise, which I think is coming from the steppers, but is very hard to say as its so quiet. All of these observations are the same whenever it is plugged in to the power, regardless of whether it is plugged in to the PC or Mach 3 is doing something.

So I'm kinda hoping that someone has some ideas for me... what are the correct ports pins settings for my setup? have I wired my steppers correctly? Are my DIP switches set right? Is there something I've missed?

Thanks very much to anyone who can help me out here!

[rwb97]

Just found another set of pins and ports settings on the internet, tried them and this time the two left hand of the axis work LED's light up, but everything else is the same.

[rwb97]

Would it be something to do with me running windows 8? From the Artsoft site: "Originally, Mach-series software only worked with the parallel port (via the parallel port driver), which was a standard port on every PC. Technologies have advanced over time, and not only is the parallel port becoming obsolete, but the Windows codebase has changed to the point where it is technically impossible for the parallel port driver to work. An external motion device is a piece of hardware that is a replacement for the parallel port. It enables a PC running Mach3/Mach4 to control outputs and read inputs. They typically communicate with the PC via an Ethernet or USB connection (but are not limited to those two means of communication). In order to control a machine using an external motion device, the developer of the hardware must write a plugin for that specific device, so no standard USB-to-parallel port adapters will work. There are many devices listed on our Plugins page in the software and download section of our website."

[cropwell]

I do not use win 8, on my CNC computer I have XP, so my comments may be qualified by ignorance, however :-
If such a concept still exists in win 8, you need to go into Control Panel, System, Hardware Devices and where the printer port is installed, check the address of the port. This should be set the same in Mach3 ports and pins setup. If these are different, you haven't a hope. The parallel port I/O cards sometimes install with non-legacy port addresses and assuming it is 278 or 378 is not necessarily correct.
The pinout I have for this board is X step 16 dir 1, Y step14, dir 7, Z step 3 dir 6

[rwb97]

Thanks very much for your help, I shall try this and let you know if I have any luck!

[JAZZCNC]

Mach3 parallel port driver doesn't work with Win8 or Xp/Win7 64Bit. You'll need 32bit XP or 32bit Win7 to use parallel port.

[gorbo]

I had this same problem, I built a PC (xp) with a PCIe Card parallel port , it was a 3 axis machine but only 2 would run, in this case it was X, swapped wires around and no joy, in desperation I tried a PC with a built on parallel port and it worked fine, so I purchased a Intel board with a built on parallel port and problem was solved, hope this helps

[rwb97]

Okey Dokey, now we're getting somewhere! The X and Y axes are working, all be it rather noisily at low speeds, but I'm sure that's something that can be fixed in motor tuning later. The problem was that in the motor tuning page there were no values in the for step pulse or direction pulse, so I set them both to 5 and workey workey! Anyone got any tips to make things run smoother? (I am aware that this driver board isn't the best example of good quality, but I'm sure theres a fair deal I can do by playing with motor tuning etc... the problems are that its very noisy and rough at slow speeds, but quieter when at high speeds (It actually sounds like I expect it to!) however there is then a regular clicking. Is this step skipping? Thanks very much for the help, I really appreciate it and now have something I can work with!

[JAZZCNC]

I guess you are running these motors on the bench.? If so then they can run rough sometimes when off the machine, it's resonance try clamping them down.! . . . BUT Still there are things you need to set in mach to get them to run something like smooth and not stall(miss steps).

Set the steps Per to match the setup you will run the machine at SO say for instance your going to run 5mm pitch ballscrew then Divide the micro stepping you set the drives to by the pitch. IE 800MS/5mm= 160 in Steps per. This will give you the correct amount of movement and dial the motors in something like correct. Then set the Velocity and Acceleration to sensible figure of 1000 & 300 respectively.

This should give you some thing like smooth movement from motors. Don't set the drive micro stepping to 200 which is the amount of steps of the motors, this will be classed as full stepping which can make motors run rough. Set it higher and you will get smoother running motors. 800 & 1600 are good figures but be aware the higher you go the more pulses required and slower the machine unless you up the Kernal speed in Mach3. Don't set Kernal higher than 45Khz otherwise mach3 can become unstable and could crash machine.

With only 24V you won't get much more than 2000mm/min velocity and 600S/S acceleration.