[angelgreatcnc]

hi, friends,

I'm puzzled why not get contact with the supplier on ebay, you buy items from he, so he should supply service for you; generally, the supplier who sell staff, they always know how to guide you for some problem as well;I'm the sales as well and we supply service for customer on-line via MSN/SKYPE all the time. I know some times you foreign customers are always a little strange to chinese staff for the first time, so you need help and guide from the chinese supplier; I believe when you turn to them, they'll try best to help you , hope good luck .

Angel

www.gt-cnc.com

[gbama]

Why cant we get a binding suggestion that will make us get a board that works. Not all of us know such intricate electronics or even understand those diagrams. Some of us are plug and play folks, so bear with us.

I have a 3 axis version of the board, and i am not trying to figure out how to get it running. I feel defeated already, but there are good boards out there, i implore the experts, please serve us some alternatives as well.

[lilimike]

Thank you Lasik for the update.

Drools,
I am expecting some 74HC14 by tomorrow so I will post back my results tomorrow.

Angel,
I bought this board on ebay, I sent them an email with my issues but got no response back so I searched this forum and found this present thread and so far I am getting a way better service from the people posting here.

Gbama,
Unfortunately if you can buy a CNC 3 axis driver board for $150 from a reputable store and you can find one that does the same for only $50 in China, the odds are you may be lucky or you may need some extra energy in getting the $50 version to work. Products made in China are what they are.

I will post back my results tomorrow.

Mike

[Drools]

I purposely filter out all products originating in China when I go surfing on eBay. That does not mean I do not buy China made products but I avoid buying direct. I feel if a person in North America is willing to resell and take responsibility for a Chinese product he or she must have at least done some testing. That being said has anyone tried going to Angel’s website? It does not work for me, maybe case in point!
Anyway I’m in the market for a simple 3 or 4 axis driver and if we can FIX these then maybe they will be on my list. It also seems the support for the product is better here that from the seller in China.

[lilimike]

I said I would post my results tonight so I don't have any final results yet but I have some improvement with the change.

I will try to make a long story short... I had a lot more trouble than the following but this was the main issue:

Before the change, using a 24 Volts power supply only X axis was working fine. Z would not sound normal above velocity = 2
Using a 12 Volts power supply all axis seemed to be working in a similar fashion however I was getting a lot of missed steps mostly with Z axis.

After making the change suggested by Lasik:
So far I have only tried the 24 Volts power supply, all axis are operating equally, maximum velocity = 13 and no missing steps, The steppers sound clear and much better than before.
Tomorrow I will perform more extensive G-Code testing and will post my results along with what my board now looks like with the Chinese FIX. I got a feeling this thing will work well.

Mike

[lilimike]

Good news,

I see no difference between using 12V or 24V power supply, I would expect the difference to be in the steppers having more power although I don't need it on my installation.

With the modification the steppers are now running at half the speed they used to run but are running without missing steps and all 3 axis are running equally.

Here is what my board looks like.


A - I took the resistor out and reused it based on Lasik's mods.
B - I cut the traces and removed the copper in between the cuts.
C - I exposed the copper for the positive and negative to power the added chip.

I made a small PCB with only the 74HC14 chip, a decoupling cap (surface mount you can see in the middle of the PCB) and soldered the A from the chip (PINS 1,3,5 green wires) and the Y from the chip (PINs 2,4,6 Yellow wires).

In Conclusion I am glad I can finely use this cheap driver board but on my next CNC building project I will invest more money on the driver board and spend more time doing something else. I have wasted one month of testing debugging searching and finely modifying the board (thanks to Lasik).

Mike

[bertyfox]

Hi guys, I`m Pablo from Argentina, I`ve recently bought this driver withaa 24V 14.5A power supply.
I`ve done the modifications and it did improve, the motors run smoother.
But I have very little torque, when locked, when applying force I can move the shaft.
The motors run OK, but with that low torque, It`s easy to loose steps.
The question is, I`ve measured the current that drains from the board and I get 2A or so, I tried with a 12volts 9A power supply and it drains about 5A but the motors can`t move.
What do you think, there is a problem with the board or the power supply?

[lilimike]

What is your dip switches setting?
I believe the MOD will cancel SW #1 so there will not be 100% of current doing to the steppers. I found the best setting for me is:

1 - NC
2 - ON
3 - ON
4 - ON
5 - OFF
6 - OFF

Mike

[bertyfox]

The Dip switches are exactly as you describe, I`ve tried any other combination with no success.
The rare thing is that both the different power supplies made the same result

[James Newton]

Has anyone compared this driver with a good homebuilt driver? Given the time you guys have spent on engineering, modifying and otherwise tuning this thing, I'm wondering if you couldn't have built your own driver in less time... especially from an open source design or kit based on a FOS design.

If any of you who have modified this Chinese driver would be interested in building and testing a Linistepper in comparison and sharing the result here (good or bad) I will refund your full purchase price and send you another lini free. The lini is a kit, but building it shouldn't take much longer than the modifications you have already made, and with an old CPU heatsink/fan or a heatsink from your junkbox, I'm betting it will do a better job in unipolar mode with your 5 to 8 wire motors.

Any takers? Let me know why your buying the kit and I'll toss in the extra resistors to tune for higher current operation.

[doorknob]

I have one of those TB6560 boards on order (the three axis version). I also have three 6-wire 290 oz. inch, 1A winding current steppers on order. And I have already considered building some Linistepper driver boards, with the intent of comparing them (my plan is to initially drive the x- and y-axes of an X/Y table that I am converting, and later to drive a z axis that will hold either a router or a die grinder spindle). With shipping from China, I am probably a couple of weeks away from being able to do this comparison, so perhaps some other folks will get there before I can do it, but I'll pipe in here whenever I get it done.

[jdrew1]

This is great info, thanks Lasik. I have a 4 axis board that looks identical to yours from Wantai Motor on Ebay. It's missing steps pretty regularly especially on the Y axis of my X2, I thought is was a resonance issue but maybe not. I'll definitely be trying this out.

[leaveme]

I have the same 3-axis board bought sometime in March this year (from Goodlucksell at eBay). I finished building my homemade CNC just last two weeks back. My X-axis was smooth but Y & Z was screaming, loosing steps and I failed to fix them anyway. I thought the TB6560 is faulty in these axis's and decided to order the chips. But at the last moment I orderd a complete new board instead of chips.

My new board arrived yesterday. I was simply shocked(!) after connecting the board because new board has exactly the same problem I have in earlier one.

Fortunately I got this thread in forum search this evening. Thank you sooo much Lasik for your brilliant reverse engineering. I'll mod the board according to your suggestion. Hope it will fix my board.
I'll post the update if I get it working.

Thanks.

[lilimike]

I got mine from Goodluck as well...

I bet they decided on the name after selling a few of these boards.

Mike

[WoodSpinner]

I've been waiting to buy one until I found out if anyone was able to get it to work well, with the mods or without, I've seen reports that it got better but nothing to indicate it was a worthwhile investment as of yet.

Has anyone been able to get it to work properly?

John

[villamany]

finally i get time to try the fix. I tried with one buffer for each "Step" pin an with two buffers for each.

Without fix i get missed steps at all torque settings, with one buffer i get good working mode up to 50% of torque setting, actually i have two buffers (serial) for each step pin and its working fine (i can not aprecciate missed steps) at 75% of torque settings. At 100% i get some missed steps.

The fix is working for me, but if i have to buy another controller i always discard this model.

Many thanks for share the great fix.

[leaveme]

What is your dip switches setting?
I believe the MOD will cancel SW #1 so there will not be 100% of current doing to the steppers. I found the best setting for me is:

1 - NC
2 - ON
3 - ON
4 - ON
5 - OFF
6 - OFF

Mike

I analyzed the MOD, it is not actually touching current settings. Just disables the "idle current" feature. SW1 still works for current setting.

[lilimike]

I was not sure 100% about that but SW1 makes no difference in the operations if it is on or off.

Mike

[leaveme]

I was not sure 100% about that but SW1 makes no difference in the operations if it is on or off.

Mike

I see there is a difference in my board. I do not have a registor that I can see in your board (marked in red). Besides, the SW1 works at least in my board. Take a look on the blue elepses: 1) there is a 10k registor which is connected at pin 1 (TQ2) of the IC and also visible in your board. 2) we are just disconnecting the connection between TQ2 and CLK.

Thanx.

[lilimike]

I see there is a difference in my board. I do not have a resistor that I can see in your board (marked in red).

This is the resistor I removed from #2 on your attachment to cut out the clock to TQ2 and I reused it as a pull-up based on the MOD (specified in red)

Take a look on the blue elepses: 1) there is a 10k registor which is connected at pin 1 (TQ2) of the IC and also visible in your board.

I see what you mean, further testing shows that it does make a small difference when I set SW11 OFF however when SW11 is ON SW12 makes no difference.


Mike