Hi all A complete newbie here. I have built a ultimate Bee 750x750 machine with a 1.5kw spindle air cooled. It has high torque nema 23 stepper motors. Tb6600 drivers and a arduino nano grbl. I cannot get it to work properly. I have come across the Blackbox. My questions are: Have any of you done what I have and changed to the blackbox successfully? Which blackbox do I choose? Openbuilds BlackBox / GRBL CNC Interface or Openbuilds BlackBox x32 Controller I am itching to get on and have some fun with the machine. Thanks for any help.
Grab a CNC Electronics Bundle - comes with everything you need. The machine you have has high inductance motors, questionable power supply, wrong type of limit switches etc, so best to get the complete kit. Wire it up as per docs:blackbox-x32:start [OpenBuilds Documentation] Make sure to take a Grbl Settings backup from the old controller to apply to the new one, as a base - then tweak from there (low inductance motors, better stepper drivers, 32 bit microcontroller etc - you should be able to get quite a bit of extra acceleration and max rate from it with a X32
Yes, sadly unfortunate - scrupolous vendors providing the "wrong" stuff first time round catches up at some point. They are quite well known for it, you can use the search above to see the familiar threads about their high inductance motors etc - the cost saving they did, has an effect unfortunately. It would be nice to get rid of it, and have a proper working machine in the end after all
Just to clear up one thing: The 'Interface' is not a controller - it is designed so that you can send commands to a controller (e.g. the X32) without a computer connected.
Good catch MisterG - that particular phrasing is used online, not by us, so Cliff, please do make sure you are looking at OpenBuilds Part Store or one of our official resellers - might be why some of it doesn't make sense to you, the aliexpress link is not ours, it misses important info you need (like the basics of what it does)? Plus could get you conned (again). Interface docs here docs:interface:start [OpenBuilds Documentation]
Hi Cliff. Although £500 is not trivial, a lot depends on how good you are with software and electronics, and how much time you are willing to devote to making your current hardware operational. It may be possible to get the system you have operational by checking wiring and the controller board configuration, but as it does not appear to be running easily now, it suggests there may be other hardware factors at play. What exactly is the current system not doing? The Blackbox uses a single 24V power supply and has good stepper drivers already built in, and with the low-inductance stepper motors in the bundle Peter suggested, will get plenty of torque for the size of the machine you have. The X32 has a 32-bit processor that is a world away from the 8-bit system used by the Arduino Uno. The Black box also has stacks of documentation regarding how to get the system operational. If you really want to stick with some of your current hardware such as the higher-inductance stepper motors, then changing to DM542 drivers and 48V power supplies would be a sensible option in order to get decent torque, but avoiding knock-off devices is important as there are many poor units out there; especially when it comes to power supplies. Even 'official' Tb6600 drivers are known to be not the greatest, so would need a *good* high voltage power supply driving the Tb6600 units to get any viable performance out of them. The Tb6600 can only take up to a 40V supply, with 36v being more typical, which is really not enough to get the most out of high-inductance motors. The X32 uses GRBL-Hal, so changing to a new controller card that can support GRBL-Hal is also a good call, and ones based on the same ESP32 units that the Blackbox uses are available, but again, there are many knock-off units around using lower-performance chips than advertised. Some of the other controller boards do not have much support, so they are not always easy to configure. The cost of the alternative non-Blackbox upgrading of the existing external drivers and power supplies, and also the controller board to a modern standard is not insignificant, especially as it will take time to wire up and integrate the devices. If you go for the electronics bundle Peter suggested, then you could probably recover some of the outlay by putting the old steppers up for sale on an auction site Evan
