Connecting to a TB6560 Extenal Driver

[Aidan gleeson]

Hi,

I recently bought a Smoothieboard x5, and I am trying to connect and run my motor through the TB6560 Stepper motor driver, but I am having no luck.

I have been able to run the motors through the internal drivers on the Smoothieboard, but with my motors being 3.5amps I need to be able to run via the external drivers in order to gain extra torque.

So far I have wired the motors as in attached image.

That is 5v to 5v (I've set alpha_step_pin  2.0o) all other pins appear to be connected correctly.

When I attempt to run the motors the run LED comes on, on the Stepper driver (TB6560) but the motors do not turn or make any noise at all. This tells me it is getting some sort of signal.

Is there any config settings that need to change, or have I got the wiring correct?

Also, what would be the correct Dip pin settings for this?

I am relatively new to this, any help would be great.

Thanks,

Aidan.       

[Mark Rehorst]

This is how I connected a smoothieboard to an external driver:

There shouldn't be any config changes except for setting the appropriate steps/mm based on the microstepping the driver uses, etc.  You can turn the current down, too.  I think I set it to 100 mA.

[Aidan gleeson]

Hi Mark,

 

Thanks for the reply, but my driver only has positive Step, Dir, En and 5V inputs, it does not have the negative Step, -Dir or - En pins. Is my driver even compatible with the Smoothie? 

Regards,

[Arthur Wolf]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 9:03 PM, Aidan gleeson <aidangl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Mark,

 

Thanks for the reply, but my driver only has positive Step, Dir, En and 5V inputs, it does not have the negative Step, -Dir or - En pins. Is my driver even compatible with the Smoothie? 

Of course.

You just have a shared GND connection instead of a GND connection for each signal.

Means your driver isn't as good for noise protection, but it should still work, and it's definitely compatible with Smoothie.

See this image for example for how it's supposed to be wired : https://cdn.instructables.com/F0U/D53T/IO34DJI8/F0UD53TIO34DJI8.LARGE.jpg

If you look at http://smoothieware.org/cnc-mill-guide#external-stepper-drivers it has two methods ( shared GND or shared 5V ) and you want the first one, as that's the only one your driver allows ( so no open-drain ).

Cheers.

Regards,

On Monday, October 23, 2017 at 2:18:59 AM UTC+1, Mark Rehorst wrote:

This is how I connected a smoothieboard to an external driver:

There shouldn't be any config changes except for setting the appropriate steps/mm based on the microstepping the driver uses, etc.  You can turn the current down, too.  I think I set it to 100 mA.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Smoothieware Support" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to smoothieware-support+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Courage et bonne humeur.

[Richard Ibbotson]

I think your connections are correct and that particular board needs a common 5V supply and also needs the step, direction and enable to be open drain.
Our experience with similar low cost TB6560 and TB6660 boards has not been good when working with the Smoothie board. We have had problems in both common +5 and common ground configurations. The boards and modules we used had different component values on different batches, some would work and some not. The Optocouplers seem to be of poor quality, so they pull a lot of current through the LED, which is a problem for the Smoothie board driver. They also seem to use the step pulse to trigger internal current control which makes the step pulse very critical.
We tried lots of fixes by changing components and increasing the length of the step pulse, but we still got intermittent results when driving direct from the Smoothieboard
Our fix was to use external ULQ2003 darlington drivers for the step, direction and enable.
We already had a board we had developed from the smoothie on a breadboard to drive our CNC Mill which needed 12V drive for the steppers. When we swapped the Smoothie with this board which has a strong 5V drive, all our problems disappeared.
Our board is on my Github if you want to use any part of it. https://github.com/ribbotson/lpcCNC