[MoparJon]

I have a plasma gantry which had a stepper motor go bad, so I need to either replace it, or what I am hoping to do is to take this opportunity to upgrade both steppers to something with a little more power. I do not want to damage my driver box though (if that is possible), so I was hoping someone might be able to give me some tips or advice.

What I have is a driver box which has 3 Applied Motion Products 2035 stepper drivers installed, one for each axis. I am currently only using two of them though since this is just an X Y gantry with no Z axis, and I have no plans to use the Z axis. The power supply in the driver box is apparently supposed to be 36VDC, I measured 32.5V going into each driver board with no motors connected. Each 2035 driver board has an adjustable amperage from 125mA up to 2.0A, and its max output power is listed as 70W. There are only 4 leads for each motor, so I am assuming this means it must be bipolar. The specs show how to wire a 4 wire motor, 6 wire motor and 8 wire motor (the 6 wire can be wired series or center tap and the 8 wire can be wired series or parallel).

I would like to select a couple of motors which will work with these drives, without damaging anything. Is it possible to damage the stepper driver by using a motor with the wrong specs, or will poor performance be the worst thing that will happen?

Since the driver for each axis goes up to 2A, should I only select motors which will have a phase current of 2 amps or less? What would happen if I were to select a motor with an amperage that is above or below the currently set amperage of my driver?

Based on other reading I have done, I know that I can multiply the phase amps by the phase resistance to get the rated voltage of the motor, and apparently I should be running the motor somewhere between 4 to 25 times the rated voltage. I can't really change my voltage, its 36v (32.5v measured), so I guess I'll just need to keep that in mind and keep the motor under 6v or so?) Do I need to concern myself with phase inductance?

Fortunately, I do have the specs of a few motors which Applied Motion recommends for this particular driver board, so if worse comes to worse, I can just try and select a motor which comes close to those specs and hope for the best.

Mainly what would be really helpful is if there are any gotchas I need to watch out for, especially in regards to potential damage to my stepper drivers; stuff like "make sure not to exceed this", or "make sure to keep this below that", etc...

Many thanks!!

-Jon-

[Al_The_Man]

You could always get some feedback from Applied Motion support, generally they are good at getting back to you, I am using a few of their servo motors.
Al.

[vladdy]

I have a couple of those, not currently using, but worked well before..
..apparantly.. I have an older version, with the autorun feature, they were very good at getting a copy of the manual to me last year...
I used them on some 8a max draw steppers, and even with 2a going into them , they functioned well...
I changed up to 203's, with the intent of using a higher voltage power supply, but so far the gecko's are running at 25v that the 2035's used, my steppers were 1.4v rated so until I get different ones, the table stays at 25v..
for what I use it for [plasma] I can get 125ipm with the steppers coupled direct to 5/8 acme..