[ldoiron17]

Dear Hobbyist and DIY community,

I am an electrical engineer with a background in power electronics and motor drives. I have been fiddling around with a fireball V90 for almost 2 years, using it to construct my own stepper motor drives. After looking through the available options online and with my past use revamping some old bridgeport machines I was looking to make a Gecko G203V kind of drive. Now I am not here to advertise some new fandangled product and try to make money off you guys, I want your insight and advice. I am starting a stepper motor drive open source hardware project and I am looking for some CNC user community input.

If you are just going to shoot me down and say you can't beat a gecko drive, they are bullet-proof and so on, I understand. I have USED them, I love them. I just don't love the price, and I am sure neither does the rest of the community at over $150 a pop. I have looked inside them bad boys and they aren't too complicated. There is also some improvement to be made, such as thermal shutdown for overheating or a better way to set the current limit.

My current drive works at 80V and 9A (with good heatsinking) which is enough to drive a rather hefty motor with no problem.

So here is my question: If you were to improve upon your already existing electronics what improvement would you make?

Would you change the motor connector? Do those screw terminal connectors work for you or are they a pain in the ass?

Would you want to see a larger drive voltage than 80V so you can drive a bigger motor, or the one you have faster?

Do LEDs that tell you if the drive has faulted help you out?

Would a hybrid stepper/servo drive interest you? (The same device could be re-programmed to drive either steppers or servo motors)

How low of a price tag would be necessary for you to take the rest of getting a new "no-name" stepper drive with the alleged ability of a Gecko G203V or G213V?

I appreciate your thoughts and if you have anything to say I would be interested to hear it!

~ldoiron17

[BuckNaked31]

I've got the 4 axis kit from CNC Router Parts, so I'm good. I can't help thinking that folks would like a low cost G540 type of box that handles higher voltages so it could drive the bigger motors and have a motion controller built in, like a smoothstepper type thing. No parallel port, just Ethernet. Don't know if it could be built that cheaply or not... oh yeah and put a heatsink on it

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[ldoiron17]

BuckNaked31,

Those are all very good points. I have pondered a motion controller built into a drive, and much like the G540 it would be modular. I plan on starting with the design of one stepper drive (like say a G203v type deal) and then expanding to a product like the G540. The problem however with integrating a motion control into the overall scheme of things is that it is 95% code that makes a good motion controller, not the hardware. I am proficient in writing software, however, keeping software up to date is hard with operating systems and standards always changing. I do however hope that one day I could integrate an open source software team into this and get something like the smooth stepper going.

Another possibility is to design something that integrates a smooth stepper as the motion control piece of the project. This however smashes my dreams of having something completely open source.

I appreciate the input!

~ldoiron17