Stepper Killer Killer Killed, Repair Attempted
The low-price servo motor in [Clough42]’s lathe’s electronic leadscrew little bit the dust lately, and he did a terrific job documenting his maintenance makes an attempt ( see online video below the crack ). When beginning the task a couple decades ago, he studied a variety of candidate motors, together with a ClearPath servo motor from Teknic’s “Stepper Killer” household. Whilst that motor was effectively suited, [Clough42] picked a significantly lessen-price tag servo motor from China which he dubbed the “Stepper Killer Killer”.
He does a extremely extensive put up-mortem of the motor’s integrated servo controller, checking the circuits and connections on the interface PCB first. Not finding any apparent challenge, he proceeds to the key PCB which includes the microcontroller, motor driver transistors, and electricity provides. There is no obvious hurt, but a examine of the logic electric power supply exhibits 1.65V wherever 3.3V is predicted. On the lookout at the board with a good-cell phone mounted IR camera, he speedily finds the terrible information — the microcontroller has shorted out.
As one particular viewer commented, all could not be dropped. If the STM32 firmware can be extracted from the new motor, there is nonetheless a probability the previous a single can be salvaged. We initial wrote about this lathe electrical leadscrew challenge a several several years in the past, and [Clough42] has because created an overall series documenting the modifications and the selections he made along the way.
