TLE5206 PowerControl Boards

@bar, what process did you go through to get the current motor controllers built?

Iā€™m thinking of designing up a new plug for the Mega that would fill the plug port while locking the shield on top. This would keep users from using the wrong port and hold the shield from coming off.

@blurfl

Would you consider adding headers for powering a fan?

Thank you

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We go through Itead

As long as itā€™s OK with @blurfl I am going to look into having these made.

I would really love to find a supplier who would make and sell them. I think itā€™s valuable to have a community ecosystem where there are multiple suppliers for parts instead of just me. Plus, someone else can probably make and ship them cheaper and faster.

Itead has a program called win-win which looks promising, does anyone know of any other similar programs which we could use? We donā€™t need to get paid anything, just want to make the boards available as low cost as possible.

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All those pins that plug into the Arduino do a very good job of holding the shield in placeā€¦

There are 5V and ground available in the AUX pins for a 5V fan. Is there a standard fan connector?

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@blurf, and everyone else in this brain storm. I have a concern, which at this time probably has no bearing. You guys seem to know way more about this stuff than I do. You talk about heat and burning up motors in an environment that could be almost explosive due to the fine dust in the air. I am not saying that would happen, but I think it should be a consideration when adding fans to the flame. I have seen grain bins explode because a spark went off inside them from a motor shorting out.

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the router itself is more of a danger in that type of environment. but we donā€™t have that type of environment.

Everyone in an enclosed space should be using active dust collection and some sort of filtering beyond a cyclone based collector. Itā€™s a significant part of the whole machine and part of its safe operation.

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More often it has been the chip that drives the motor bulging rather than actual flames, but I agree that dust management and situational awareness are important.

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For boards you can look at https://oshpark.com/shared_projects which allows you to share Gerber files and people can order boards. For populated boards, maybe some place like polulu or sparkfun would be interested in making/selling them.

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Thatā€™s good news, since Iā€™m no longer allowed near a soldering iron :smiley:

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Itā€™d be awesome if the boards also had the aux pins (Iā€™m looking at you z axis zero and router on/off) already hooked up to a harness. Like @Weps, Iā€™m soldering iron averse and would be happy to just plug in something to the board instead of soldering to it.

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Any new board should have pass-throughs for all unused pins on the Mega too. (for reasons TBD)

cheers,

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I agree, but the ICSP connector that lives in the middle of the board would be awkward to accommodate. Those signal pins are available on the edge pins of a Mega, though.

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I understand. It is very nice when things just plug together and go. :blush:

There are a lot of pins in the AUX group, and packing them tight together saves board space. That tight spacing does make it hard to add keyed connectors for each set, though. Does anyone know of a single connector that would be appropriate? Should they be spaced out to allow individual keyed connectors?

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perhaps breaking out just the ones that are already utilized? or maybe 4 sets to allow for future expansion, but without needing to take up the space for pins that may not ever be used?

Right now the z-axis and spindle pins are well established, so it would make sense to pull those aside.

If we have freed up SPI then I will look into a SD card on SPI again. I would really like to be able to use a memory card like my 3D printers.

Thank you

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sure, I ran into this roadblock when investigating adding bluetooth last year. this was but one of a few reasons I dropped my research.

It seems obvious to me that thinking about retaining all possible capability available in the Mega is a good ideaā€¦

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I had a version that put an uSD card on the bottom, but in my brief testing the SD file operations interfered with the interrupt-driven motor routines. You may find a way to get them to mesh smoothly.

As I have not looked at the coding side of this and donā€™t have the chops in that area to do much with it, however I would see it as a bucket brigade. Load some G-code, Execute to the buffer size, pause the motors, load more in the buffer, Resume. Rinse repeat?

Thank you

That might do, so long as having the motors stopped during file operations is permitted. The encoder interrupts must not be missed.

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not a harness, just header pins.