While I was connecting my steppers I had to figure out what wires went where. On my salvaged motors I was able to find that it had the following terminals:
- B\
- B
- A
- A\
- 2B
- 2A
- 1A
- 1B
I was pretty confident that hooking up the pins in order would get the job done (B\ = 2B) but to check I measured the resistance between leads. Between B and B\ I measured about 1.13Ohms (about the same for A, A\). Between any other pin combination I read infinite resistance/no continuity. This confirmed that I was at least hooking up the right coils. As it turns out the direction was right as well.
The motor seemed to step a repeatable amount when I jogged first in a positive direction then in the same negative distance. I turned down (CCW) the current limiting potentiometer on the Pololu stepper driver almost all the way and the motor still had good torque and stayed cool. When I had it set at about the midpoint the motor seemed to whistle a bit and started to get warm even with the fan blowing on it.
The fan turned on and off fine, but RepSnapper has an option to change the fan voltage which didn’t seem to work. Maybe my hardware only supports on/off control here. The ultra-light, translucent, adhesive mounting brackets I used to hold the fan to my desk worked surprisingly well and stopped it from walking away.
My power supply seems to be working wonderfully with a bit of stereo wire clamped in the binding posts and screwed into the RAMPS terminal plug.
Next steps:
- Build some lead screw prototypes with weights on them
- Have the motors turn the lead screws and see how fast I can jog back and forth without skipping steps or melting motors.