I put the generously sponsored TLE5206 Board for a test run the past few days.
A 12V/10A from china made sure I will get ~ 7-8A without magic smoke.
Spoiler:
It’s been great 4 Maslow holidays!
Starting with calibration I ended lucky, as nothing that was not already crap, was damaged.
A 1 year unnoticed flex in my motor mount mock-ups became visible and has prevented other parts form breaking. I think I will keep a ‘predetermined breaking point’ in mind with this shield, for a new topic.
The most feared Maslow-Panic-Moment is when nothing stalls and all forces are unleashed.
A human error entering a wrong number during calibration was likely the reason for me to witness how my steel motor mounts can flex, twist and bend. This I’ve I tried 2 times in a row before I discovered a -10something in the settings for the motor distance.
A sanity check of all numbers we have is required and even with different frame dimensions, sled weights and modifications, we know the upper and lower limits what makes sense. Before the ‘Pull Tight’ there needs to be a "Are we Green?’.
The second day I hooked the chains on the marked position, set chain length manually, adjusted all settings that I know to their hand measured value and did a new calibration. This time my already twice compromised motor mounts (bent back) would still show a flex but survived the 3 seconds.
I did the calibration cuts, entered the measurements and got through.
Knowing frame and motor mounts have exceeded their lifetime, the TLE5206 Board test was the goal the last 4 days and to run it, I choose something simple and that will still work with crappy machine.
I ran the board 6 hours and fingertip checks on the board felt always cold. (I admit I have my board in the flow of the AC)
I have fried 2 motor-shields in the past and thing I have 1 that has not decided yet if it is good and bad. I do not see this happening any time soon with my ~17kg sled. I’m confident I can pack on more weight (hypothetical).
With truncation turned off in the settings, I ran 2 files (~6hours) with 8 decimals behind the point in one go.
Due to a surprise gift from my co-worker (from the land of Kamasutra) of 11 sheets 1200mm x 800mm of OBS? Whatever, it’s free so I’ll cut it, I only tested around the centre and not at the top of a full ply sheet.
just checking (because it’s something I’ve been nervous about with the latest design tweaks), even when you were pulling hard enough to bend up the motor mounts, you didn’t bend the linkage at all, right?
It might, if you found one with the right specifications. I looked last time they were mentioned but didn’t see any that seemed right. The TLE5206 chip has active over-current and over-temperature protection, but the stock boards could benefit.
I thought the issue with the error flag on the TLE5206 is that we go PWM and half of the time it is low. If there was a way to tell that is constant low then it could be used. Just talking, actually know nothing about this stuff.
I haven’t looked deeply into the error flag of the chip to give a good answer. The data sheet - see sections 1.8 and 2 - suggests that the flag would be low during a fault, but that the affected motor driver output(s) would be tri-stated as well. Tri-stating the outputs would stop the motor from moving and trigger the ‘Sled is not keeping up…’ alarm.
The flag pin is open-collector, so the software would need to turn on the Mega’s internal pull-up resistor for those error flag pins or one would need to wire a resistor to 5v for that pin while experimenting. One could put a scope or a min/max meter on one of them and torture that motor (adjustable load instead of a motor?) to see if interesting things happen. If someone’s interested and will report their findings, I could do a version of the firmware that does the needed pull-up setup for the TLE5206 board.
what is the recommended heatsink for the surface mount version? Hopefully not aluminum stuck on with double sided tape because those come off too easy.
The same heat sink as the stock boards is the only thing I found when researching the SMD boards. That’s one reason that I made the through-hole version - I like the heat sink affixed to the board and the chip.
If you have the free version of eaglecad, you can convert them, but it was kind of tricky, I’ll share my converted files, I never ended up using them once I heard bee was going to sell kits.
digikey no longer sells the specific 1uf capacitor they list 3 alternatives, of the 3 alternatives only one is in stock
1276-1860-1-ND
is it fine to substitute the above cap in place of the original one? I’m assuming yes, but I’m not a circuit expert.
got a quote from a Chinese company for ten assembled boards with shipping will come out to be about $600 or $60 each. buyone just one assesmbled wasn’t really economical with all the set up fees.
