I sincerely appologise for wasting your time, I am trying to work on this and fill other orders (that would be exponentially easier to do if I had this machine up and running) so my focus is a bit split. I re-read what you asked and followed the directions to the letter:
So I am trying to wrap my head around what this means and how it affects the wiring and control. Does this mean that the GND (5V-) needs to be back in the picture? According to the wiring that Michael posted that he got off of the product page on Amazon there is no 5V- connected to anything.
Nice, we we are not going nuts and things do work as we expect.
We now have 2 options to work from because we don’t know if the firmware on your controller is expecting to drive the motor PUL active when the signal goes to ground/0V or if it expects PUL to be active when the signal goes high/5V.
But you can hopefully test things by leaving everything as you just had it and got it moving the motor with tapping a ground wire to PUL- except now take your STEP wire from your controller and connect it to the PUL- on the motor driver module. At this point you connect your controller board to your PC and instruct the software to move. WARNING, this might not work because you don’t have end stop switches connected but if this is for a CNC then there’s a good chance you don’t even use end stop switches and then your ‘bench’ testing can proceed.
If you get motion with just connecting the STEP signal to the PUL- the next thing to try is connecting the DIR signal from the controller to the DIR- on the driver module and see if you can control the direction(ie change direction).
And if that works you know you can set up micro-stepping, install the setup in the machine and then test if the direction is as expected AND if the distance moved is as expected.
To try to explain a little about what’s going on I’ve copied the earlier image of what’s called a photodiode. It’s a device which has an LED on one side and a device called a transistor opposite which when light from the LED hits the base(the short line) it will let energy flow from through the wires on the right. When energy can flow though those wires it then triggers electric circuits inside the driver module which operate things like stepping motion, setting the direction of motion or disabling the motor.
What you did was connect 5V+ to the PUL+ connection and by itself it doesn’t do anything because a “circuit” needs a loop for electricity to flow and make stuff happen. So 5V+ is on the PUL+ and when you touch PUL- with the ground you have made a circuit loop so power from the 5V+ side can flow through the LED to the gound side and back to the 5V-/ground of what ever power supply you’re using(5V from the controller board).
With electricity flowing through that LED it will light up and send photons(see the 2 arrows) over to the base(short line) of that transistor and it’ll then let that conduct electricity through the 2 wires on that side of the device. The whole reason for this type of device control is so that the circuits which connect to PUL+ and PUL- are electrically isolated from the circuits working with the high power stuff making the motors move.
As I said previously, we don’t know for sure if your controller firmware is designed to move the STEP signal to 0V/gnd when it wants the pulse to be triggered because it could possible expect the pulse to be triggered when the STEP signal goes to 5V. If it is such that it expects to pulse when the STEP signal goes to 5V, then in order to make the electricity flow through the LED when the STEP signal goes to 5V, you would connect the STEP wire to the PUL+ side and then connect Ground to the PUL- connection. Are you picturing energy flowing from a 5V signal to the PUL+ connection, through the LED and out PUL- back to ground?
Success!!! Using Lightburn, I sent the signal for the motor to move 100mm on the Y axis (the axis I am plugged into - no reason, just random). The motor moved about 1/2 revolution on the ON ON OFF setting of the DIP switches (1 micro step), hummed, and then about 1/16 revolution at the end. I then changed the DIP switches to OFF OFF OFF (32 micro steps), and it spun the entire movement cycle.
Leaving the DIP switches on the 32 microstep setting, I then shut everything down, connected the DIR wire, and restarted. Again, success. It looks like I am up and running. I tested all 3 axes and all three worked. I then closed LightBurn and opened Easel and had success there. Hot Damn!
I swear I had connected things like this at some point, but looking at my pictures, I think the GND was involved in all of them. I did stop taking pictures at some point, but whatever, I think we have a solution!
I will give a final update when I am all hooked back up, but thank you, Doug, and Michael for all the patience and help. I have learned a TON through this process.
