I purchased some very cheap stepper drives based on the TB6660 Toshiba chip a little while ago for a very much "budget driven" controller build using LinuxCNC for a Sherline Mill and Lathe.
They are all over Ebay and the part number of the side is HY-DIV268N-5A I think I paid $17 each for them with free shipping. They claim to be good for 5 amps and 48 volts DC. Other people have said they are only good for about 4 amp and 40 volts. I purchased 3 drives from a guy in the US off Ebay and immediately took them apart when I got them. Some of the leads in the through holes were not cut off close to the board and it appears that they would contact the aluminum heat sink and short out. I trimmed the leads and slid in a piece of heavy paper to try and keep any leads away from the heat sink and reassembled the drives. I put them in a box (3 drives total) and wired them to a 36 volt power supply and a $10 Chinese breakout board also off Ebay. I wired everything up and have had it powered up for several days now without issues. I only have one stepper motor to play with (the rest of the machine/s is in Wyoming) I used the standard LinuxCNC setup example but changed the scaling so I could set the drives to 8x microstepping. (the example seems to be setup for 4x microstepping) The stepper motors are 2 amp motors and they run warm but not ridiculously hot with these stepper drives. There are some real horror stories about these drives but most of the stories are from 1-2 years ago. Apparently the Chinese fixed the issues as the table printed on the side of the drive to set the stepping and amp settings seems to be correct. If you have a budget motion control project I would recommend them. I wish I could have used some Gecko drives in this box but considering that three of these cheap drives cost less than one 3.5 amp Geckodrive, and they do drive the stepper motors, what is there not to like. Dave --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
