I need some help. I found this board that is perfect for my new printer build. It got 6 stepper drivers integrated for 5-phase stepper motors which are superb against regular 2 phase. New drivers would cost me small for fortune but I manage to snatch this board for 60$. Which is 10$ per driver. The catch is that seller didn’t got any documentation with it. SO if someone got some info about this board I will be very happy or just guest based on usage of similar drivers for the general parameters, jumpers or potentiometers.
While I don’t know that board in particular, drivers usually have a few common characteristics. Firstly, each have a step, direction, and enable pin. Secondly, the potentiometers are typically used to control a reference voltage to the drivers where it then uses that voltage to scale current.
Your best bet is to find out these characteristics from the drivers datasheet. Look on top of them and see their model number and then search it up. After that, it’s a matter of matching the pins on that connector up to an IC to drive em.
That may be a tough one to crack. A lot of these old 5 phase drivers were used in Japanese copying machines. You may get lucky and find info in repair manuals.
With modern 2 phase (square body) stepper motors and microstepping drivers, 5 phase isn’t really any better. I still have some old Berger Lahr 5 phase motors and Vexta drivers but they don’t perform any better than my Geckodrives. The older Vexta drivers were not standard step/direction but were clockwise/counter clockwise signal input. I used a programmed Pic to convert step/dir to cw/ccw. Keep that in mind when trying to figure out the pin outs. Good luck.
@Jim_Fong This driver should not be that old. Maybe few years. If you see the board it got QR code and also it is typed 07/14 which most probably is the year of the manufacture. Also it seems to use PIC instead of pre-driver which is something from the new Vexta drivers. Also it use old Mosfet Arrays which are not as per their latest drivers. So I hope it use dir/pulse but if they use cw/ccw I will program pic to mitigate this one.
As per Gecco their drivers are superb but cost a fortune. 150$+ for a driver is more than what Vexta/Oriental asked for a brand new 2-p driver with motor or same as 5-p driver and motor. But for printer spending 500$+ for drivers and motors is too much for me.
