Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

We have our Acorn wired up properly for power and have the estop signal bypassed to allow us to test on the bench, but we are unable to get a stepper to move. We verified the phases by checking the resistance, and wired them up accordingly on the TB6600 stepper drive.

When we power up the Acorn and enable the TB6600, the motor begins to hold, but sending it move commands does not create motion. After a short move command we can hit the reset button and hear the motor release (it is already hooked up to a ball screw with a Spindle mounted to it).

The stepper motor we are driving has a 1.8 degree step angle, so we set our steps per rev at 200 (on both the drive and in the Acorn config).

Really not sure where to go next to troubleshoot. The drive is enabled and is providing holding torque to the stepper, but sending move commands does not do what we expect. Does anyone have some tips on what to troubleshoot next?

First, unhook the motor from everything and just lay it on the bench. The idea is to get the drives working BEFORE you hook them up to anything. I know nothing about the TB6600 but since you have it set at 200 steps per rev can we assume that you are not microstepping the drive? 200 is for full step. I would start with 1/8 microstepping and set the steps per rev to 1600, nothing less. Set the overall turns ratio to 1 for testing. Set the step rate on the advanced tab to 100,000. Check your axis signal inversion as well. Any boxes checked here? See if you get movement with these settings.

We figured it out! We had everything correctly connected but we were using the enable pin when, in reality, both did not need to be connected .

The other issue we had we taking the COM from the Acorn board to the TB6600 driver. We actually had to take +5V from the power supply to the pulse +5V and jump to Direction +5V. Watch the below video for an example of this... Skip to the very end if you want the full diagram.



I hope this helps someone else!

Those stepper drives should be connected to the DB25 header and set no higher than 100k step pulse

From what I could find on the Internet, the TB6600 is similar to the DM542 drives that I use. My drives have opto-couplers to transfer the step, direction, and enable signals from the controller to the drive. An opto-coupler doesn't care if the signal is High or Low as long as it is wired correctly. I've used the DB25 connectors on the Acorn to source 5VDC and to sink 5VDC. The steppers move either way.

If I want to eliminate the need for a 5VDC power supply, I connect the (+) side of the drive's Step input to the Acorn's Step signal and the (-) side of the drive's Step input to GND.

If I want to use a 5VDC power supply, I connect the (+) side of the drive's Step input to +5VDC and the (-) side of the drive's Step input to the Acorn's Step signal.

I'm attaching a simple schematic that shows what I'm writing about:
(Schematic edited again. It should be right this time.)