[TTalma]

I just purchased an AXYZ Millennium table. With no front end control. There is a custom board to interface with the PC that I will remove. It uses 2 different stepper drivers a Pacific Scientific 6410 on the Z axis and 2 AXI 2200's for the X and Y.

I am planning on removing the custom AXYZ board and replaceing it with a Warp 9 Smooth stepper.

The thing that is confusing me is that the Step+ and Dir+ are tied together on all 3 axis (Step- and Dir- are separate). Is this common? Will it work with the sooth stepper, I can break the signals out separately on the Pacific Scientific driver, But I cannot find any documentation on the AXI driver so I am not sure how to handle those.

[sparkness]

that can work that way it's called common anode and it may work common cathode . you can wire your breakout board to connect either way .Do you have a pic of the drive?

[john-100]

the Pacific Scientific 6410 has all 6 terminals from the step , direction & enable opto-isolators available

so you can either

connect the + step , +direction & +enable to +5V and connect the - step , -direction & -enable to the 3 smooth stepper outputs
or
connect the - step ,- direction & - enable to 0V/gnd and connect the+ step ,+ direction & + enable to the 3 smooth stepper outputs

you will just have to set the outputs to either active high or active low accordingly

while the smooth stepper outputs can sink (to gnd) or source (from +5V) 24mA

Attachment 387300

it would be safer to use a smooth stepper breakout board or C10 breakout board to protect the smooth stepper
( I have not used a smooth stepper so I'm not sure how well its outputs are protected from shorts to the 5V power supply )

John

[sparkness]

the ESS documentation states "The ESS relies on the breakout board for isolation " and "The ESS has drivers that are capable of driving opto-isolators directly" thru the 74ACT541 chip as john shows.