I am now so close to joining the desktop fabrication/manufacturing revolution that I can smell it. Unfortunately for me, that smell is the reek of burning semiconductor, but I’ll get to that later.

I got the PC controller (EMC running on Ubuntu) and stepper motor driver boards all wired up and working great. The Micro kit comes with a nice optically coupled DB25 breakout board for interfacing the stepper driver boards to the controller computer.

The stepper motor drive boards that Lumenlab supplies with the Micro kit are are really nice, and hooking them up is a snap. My kit originally shipped with some rather fragile driver boards, but Lumenlab has since upgraded the kit with these new industrial strength driver boards.

The difficult part for me was finding a combination of parallel port output pins on the PC that would work correctly, as the computer that I am using seems to have some strange quirks, but I will get into the computer and software in the next post.

The kit came with 4 different colored cat 5 network cables to use when hooking up the steppers that motivate the 3 axes of motion. I found some telephone butt connectors (you heard me right, BUTT CONNECTORS hehe…) that fit snugly onto the molex pins on the driver boads. The motors have 4 hookup wires each, so you can conveniently use a twisted pair for each motor wire.

I got everything temporarily wired up and working reliably on the desktop before taking it apart in order to install it inside the housing that I borrowed from a sweet looking 1960′s Japanese Koyo CCTV camera.

At the motor end, I soldered and heat-shrinked the twisted pairs to the motor wires and secured the cables to the motor mounts with some nylon cable clamps for stress relief.

So about that smell… You see, if you’ve never worked with electronic circuits before, you may not know this, but they are powered by smoke. Yeah, and if you let the smoke out, they don’t work any more.

Well, I accidentally let the smoke out while I was troubleshooting a minor glitch that occurred after I installed the boards into the box. Minor setback. More later.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Electronics, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.