I'm in King of Prussia. Unfortunately I have to repair/rebuild my garage which is going to take most of my free time and disposable budget over spring and summer, but I may steal time to do a McWire while doing so. If we can get a few SE PA folks together, we could do a wings and beer night once in a while to yak and maybe save some shipping by co-ordering parts and supplies. -- TWZby ColonelZen - Pennsylvania RepRap User Group
Triffid Hunter: You mentioned putting a heatsink on the Pololu board on my "drive by" thread as well. Since you have experience with this board, how do you mount a heatsink on it? According to the chip datasheet there is a thermal/groundplane on the bottom, and they recommend holes underneath the chip to vent it. Generally I would expect putting a heatsink on top, over the plastic case toby ColonelZen - Controllers
The A4983 datasheet has a sample board layout ... oversized, so you'd have to shrink it and mess with the colors to get black/white before printing it as a board, but it's certainly a place to start. The pololu board is advertised some places as a "breakout board" ... and that's pretty much what it is; it houses the chip and minimal necessary support components and otherwise just provides aby ColonelZen - Controllers
Sorry to be such a pain, but I'm still not getting this. The sense resistor can tell the controller that the current coming out is too high, yes, but as I see how I think the (second/slave) bridge would be connected, the controller has no control over the current or voltage coming out of the slave. As the bridge inputs are effectively rendering the controller outputs as purely digital inputsby ColonelZen - Controllers
I'm a bit new to this stuff, but wouldn't you lose the current limiting feature which makes it possible to overdrive the stepper at overvoltage without burning it out? -- TWZby ColonelZen - Controllers
Forgive me as I am just getting a lot of eye-tracks over the board and site and while interested I'm only sorta kinda maybe thinking about doing a 3d printer a couple projects down the road. But I have ordered half a dozen surplus steppers powerful and sized enough to use if I decide to ... they look like fascinating toys at any event. Anyway, I've looked at how to control them, looked at whatby ColonelZen - Controllers