[bongiorno]

Hi I just received my G540 and I'm pretty new to the cnc game and I want to make sure I am hooking up the steppers correctly.

What I have :
G540 Motion controller: http://www.geckodrive.com/gecko/imag...G540Pinout.jpg

23H276-28-4B steppers - Specifications:
Size: Nema 23 (Size 57)
Phase: 2 Phase
Step Angle: 1.8 Degrees
Voltage: 70V Max
Current: 2.8A
Resistance: 1.2ohm
Inductance: 4.7mH
Holding Torque: 269 Oz-in
Dual Shaft
Bipolar 4 Wire
Wiring
Black > A+
Green > A-
Red > B+
Blue > B-

24VDC/5.0A Power Supply
24VDC Fan with 2-pin Molex connector

*** Does the DB9-Stepper connections below look right? ***:
pin1: Current SET resistor - 1/4w resistor end
pin2: GND
pin3: GND
pin4: GND
Pin5: Current Set Resistor - 1/4w resistor other end
Pin6: Phase B motor wire - Stepper Red B+
Pin7: Phase /B motor wire - Stepper Blue B-
Pin8: Phase A motor wire - Stepper Black A+
Pin9: Phase /A motor wire - Stepper Green A-

Thanks for any help! :wee:
Frank

[Mariss Freimanis]

The DB-9 wiring is correct. Use a 2.7K resisistor (red, violet, red, gold).

Mariss

[bongiorno]

Thank you - I'll be soldering tonight! I picked up a 2.7k and 100k so I just won't use the 100k in parallel.

[Mariss Freimanis]

bongiorno,

The G540s are a pain in the rear with the connectors they use (need good soldering skills) and having to find current set resistors. I'm speaking as the G540 designer here.

If you are interested, here's the back story on the G540 and how it came to be; basically it was an unintended accident that went very wrong.

Here's the story: We had just developed the G250 microstep drive. It was a pint-size version of our bigger drives. The design goal was to build a half-current, 2/3 rated voltage version stripped of every non-essential part all the way down to resistors and capacitors while still meeting all the performance features or big drives have.

The cool cover case went, the hard-anodized mounting plate went, the opto-isolators and connectors went. It was a total scorched-earth design; keep all the good stuff intact (morphing, mid-band resonance compensation, recirculating mode standby and deadly-accurate sine-cosine current fidelity) while brutally discarding everything else.

The G250 goal was to see how cheaply we could build a quality drive to service NEMA-23 motors. The design goal was "keep all the goodness, get rid of every ounce of fat".

We did all that, now we had to sell it.

The idea that occurred was to build demonstrator that packaged four of these G250 drives that would show what the G250s can do in a proper environment. The demonstrator included short-circuit protection, and (at the time) convenient ports for motors and a PC interface.

My expectation was no more than a dozen or so of these G250 demonstrators would be built. The demonstrator's purpose after all was to sell G250s to clients to let them see what the G250 drives can do.

Everything here has to have a project name so the demonstrator was named after the first available number in its product name class; G540. More than a dozen have been built; we are coming up to 15,000 copies sometime this spring. Who would have figured that? I didn't.

Mariss

[Mariss Freimanis]

I forgot to mention. I'm coming off the G215 project which is our first drive with an embedded motion controller. It's major thing for us.

It redounds to the G540 because everything we have learned from the G215 will wind up in a motion control enabled G540 we will be calling the GM540. "GM" stands for "GeckoMotion", our name for our motion control firmware.

New smaller 4-axis package, easy to use connectors, everything different and better. No, it won't work with Mach3 at all. The GM540 will contain its own GeckoMotion CNC open-source firmware.

Mariss

[bongiorno]

Mariss - Great story and thank you for the sneak peek on what is to come next!

I was able to solder the db9's with no issues last night and test my setup. It's working extremely smooth and I thank you for the help.

A few years ago i purchased a xylotex board but never got it working correctly. Z axis was jumpy and A made noise and did not move. Through countless hours of troubleshooting I determined there was something wrong with the board. Having been frustrated for so long thinking I was doing something wrong i was somewhat turned off of pursuing my vision of building a cnc machine. However, recently I went ahead and purchased a g540 based on the praises from this and other forums.

I can definitively say as a novice, this is a great setup and I look forward turning my attention on learning mach3 and not having to worry about troubleshooting faulty equipment anymore.

Big thanks,
Frank

[Chip Chester]

Mariss --
Timely information, as I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a small system.
So, how long do I need to wait, and how much do I need to budget?

(And I've seen that "prototype -- oops, now it's production" path before! Kudos for your candor.)

Chip