PowerComms v1.3.0 to Stepper motor driverv1.1

Hi,

I recently started working on the reprap electronics. I have soldered all the parts together. I am really excited.

Well Im trying to hookup all the boards together in series starting with the PowerComms board followed by the three stepper motor driver boards. I wasn't able to find any instructions on hooking up the boards following the generation 1 method.

Does anyone know how to connect the PowerComms v1.3.0 to the Stepper motor driver v1.1?

It looks like the Rx and Tx connections from the PowerComms board goto the Stepper motor driver board but where? Is it GND, Step, Dir, Min, Max, Enable, Sync, Sync Full, Half, SM.

And then how do I connect the stepper board to the next stepper board?

--thanks

--sun2407

Where's the microcontroller?

I think you want a controller rather than just a driver, looks like there's no microcontroller in either of those.

See [reprap.org] , note that it has its own microcontroller, a pic16Fsomething.

Also see [reprap.org] , note that the arduino (atmega168 microcontroller) provides the proper signals for several stepper motor drivers.

If you use stepper driver boards, you need an Arduino to connect them. You could get a universal controller board as well, but then you need to write your own firmware.

If you don't have an Arduino yet, but you do have a spare computer with a parallel port, you can start experimenting with EMC (http://www.linuxcnc.org). Just download the live cd from above site. It's not RepRap, but it drives your steppers just fine.

--Blerik

Oops. It looks like I bought the wrong card. Instead of buying the Stepper Motor Controller Card - v1.2 I got the stepper motor driver card v1.1.

Well, does anyone have a frabricated Stepper Motor Controller Card - v1.2. It looks like the online Reprap shop does not sell it anymore.

How is the Ardunio based reprap coming along? Has anyone been able to get a fully functioning reprap with Ardunio?

hey,

sorry about the confusion. i guess with similarly named boards it was bound to happen.

anyway, here's the status:

1. i'm reordering the older stepper motor controller v1.2 cards. should be up in 2 weeks when they get in from china.

2. theres a bug in the arduino firmware for doing SNAP emulation from the host software. i'm not sure if i'm capable of solving it. *however*, today i had quite a bit of success with the GCode based firmware (ie: i printed some parts!). it should be fairly easy to write a gcode output function for the RepRap host so that it is all capable of playing nicely.