Month: August 2017

I have been looking at the maker made products on Tindie for quite sometime now.  There are a lot of interesting things for sale there.

The other day I purchased an item from a vendor.  Before I did, I asked the seller a few questions about their product. We exchanged a few messages via Tindie.  I have asked a few other sellers questions as well and have gotten prompt responses back.  The item I purchased was a Creltek RJ-45 Stepper Breakout board.  It allows you to use Cat 5e cables to hook up your stepper motors. I will wire the breakout board to my stepper controller.  On the stepper side, I will be using these surface mount cat5e boxes from Monoprice.  They are pretty inexpensive.  These parts are slated to be for my X-Carve build.

I have quite a few items on my Tindie wish list. One of the items that looks interesting is this 200w Stepper Driver Kit.  That is 200w of continuous power and not peak.  It is for people who have a standard Ramps or Arduino CNC shield setup and want to drive larger stepper motors. While you can wire it directly to the Ramps (or CNC Shield), you will probably want to use their optional pololu adapters.  So it basically is plug in and go.  Well it is, after you solder it.  It is an electronics kit in the old school sense, you must solder it together.  But there are quite a few Ramps and Arduino CNC shields out there which use pololu drivers, so having an easy retrofit that allows you to use larger steppers is a bonus.  Check them out.

Many of the vendors have their own websites in addition to their Tindie store front.  You might want to check out their websites for sales and lower prices.  As an added bonus they might have a youtube channel with videos featuring some of their products.

Yesterday I received in the mail, my Gradus M1 Pro Grbl CNC controller.  It accepts pololu style drivers like the SD8825, SD6128, and A4988.  It also accepts the newly developed Bigfoot driver profile which features a larger footprint to accommodate higher current drivers like the BSD4989 running at 4A.  I ordered one with the Bigfoot BSD109A drivers which can handle 3A per phase and up to 48v.

Only 3 of the 4 BSD109A drivers were shipped, so I contacted Panucatt customer support about the missing driver.  They have been good to work with in the past. (Edit: I spoke too soon.  It has been 18 days since I contacted them on Aug 5th.  I contacted them again 6 days ago.  Still no reply back.)  I got in on the Kickstarter that they produced for their RE-ARM Controller for Ramps.  “RE-ARM is a 100Mhz, 32-bit ARM controller with the popular Arduino MEGA footprint. It’s a plug-in replacement for the Arduino Mega in your RAMPS setup for a quick and easy upgrade to 32-bit goodness.”

I am looking at using the Gradus M1 Pro in my X-Carve build.  The nema 23 steppers from Stepperonline that I have ordered are rated at 2.8A per phase.  So the Gradus M1 Pro with the Bigfoot drivers should be a good fit.