I was 'upgrading' the wiring on my two-spindle Adept CNC machine, and slightly reconfiguring the interface design.
I put it all together and switched it on.
There was a bang, an electric smell, and a desperate sinking feeling.
I had switched the +5 V and the +24 V supplies to one PCB, and some of the chips had craters in their tops.
Sigh, and Oh Dear.
So I replaced the chips and checked out the PCB. All was well.
But the CNC did not work - in fact, nothing worked except that the ESS did still load from the PC and did think it was moving the axes. But, of course, the axes were not moving.
Much function and circuit checking followed.
To cut a long and sad story short, the +24 V had gone through the drivers on the two off MB-02 BoBs, and into the drivers on the ESS. Since the PC was loading the FPGA at power up and was reporting movement, it seemed likely (according to Andy at Warp9) that the FPGA was still intact. But the output pins were not waving.
What to do now? (Obviously, this was going to cost something!)
I went to the Homann Designs web site to buy another two MB-02s, but they were out of stock. I gather his pick&place machine which populates his PCBs was temporarily down. Bother, How to replace - what options were there?
Well, there are other BoBs from other companies, but most of them seemed to require that you also buy a new pulse engine (replacing the ESS) plus, in some cases, you replace Mach3 with their own program. There are not that many pure replacement options out there. This was NOT a route I wanted to explore.
I needed a new ESS anyhow, so I contacted Peter Homann in Victoria about all this, and poured out my woes. In particular, when would he have new MB-02 units available? He explained about his P&P machine, confirmed that he had ESS in stock, and then offered to repair my damaged MB-02 BoBs. Really? Yes. Then he added that the repairs would be free. FREE!
You don't get that sort of support from Chinese vendors!
So early last week I sent my two dead MB-02s off to him and ordered a new ESS. The repaired boards and the new ESS arrived today: a little over 1 week later. The MB-02s had been cleaned in an ultrasonic bath by the looks of things, and you could not see where the output driver chips had been replaced. OK, I have yet to put the machine together, but it worked straight off the first time, and Peter said he was able to check the operation of the MB-02s in-house.
I did get equally good service from Peter years ago, when one of the Geckos I had bought from him died. It turned out that the insulation between the heat sink and the FETs had broken down, and there was sparking around the edges. I sent him a photo of the sparking and he dispatched a new Gecko the next day.
This is a level of service I rarely see, either in Australia or around the world. (Actually, Gecko in USA are similar.)
Cheers
Roger