Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: 4 phase driver, 2 phase motors. can this be wired to work?

racingjewels wrote:

> My Mistake Bill, These are DB25 connectors and they are stepper drives
> Unfortunately , no manual is available... even from the manufacturer..
> they sent me a few pages of info that they had... but not everything
> I need to know.
> By having 3 parallel ports on my computer, would I be able to hook
> them up or is there a better way?

How can you possibly hook up something that you have absolutely
no specs for? You think that by just plugging in a 25-conductor
cable it is going to work? And if it doesn't work in the serial port,
then you'll just move the cable over to the parallel port, and it is
going to go?

You need to know what signal is on what pin of the connector, what the
electrical characteristics of the signlas are, and what the signals
mean.

It could be RS-232 signals (+ and - voltages, zero volts
is not valid) at some baud rate, with some synchronous or asynchronous
character format, with some additional meaning in the control lines
such as clear to send, request to send, etc.

It could be several TTL level signals (+5 V is a digital 1; 0V is a digital
0) or some other voltage levels, +12 V was often used in older industrial
electronics. The signals could be step and direction, or phase signals,
or encoded commands like move at 50 steps/second backwards for
225 steps, or anything else. These units could also be indexers, not
positioning drivers, ie. they will move at some programmed rate for
a programmed number of steps every time they are told to "go".

The signals could also be current loop, possibly with opto-couplers
at the inputs.

Without documentation, or a lot of experience with this kind of gear,
you just don't know, and plugging things in by guesswork may smoke
your computer. Just making the assumption that because it has a
familiar 25-pin connector it has to plug straight into a PC is completely
wrong.

Jon