Serge: I didn't realize you were a fellow Canuck!.... I could have sold you the stepper drivers, I usually have them in stock. Visit my website at 3DTechWorks.ca. You may find some useful information on my Blog. Yes, stay away from the smaller TB6560 boards with the small aluminum heatsink on the back. I've had no end of trouble with those. And if you need help with settings both for your boards and GRBL, don't hesitate to contact me. You can start a conversation and we can move it to your post. Also, you should be using GRBL 1.1F, which is the latest. You can find it on Github, but there is a different site for the 1.1 version than the 0.9 and earlier versions... And Merry Christmas to everyone here too. MG
I moved our 'chatter' to my build (myOX link below) ... Nice site and I like the blog content. It covers enough about the various aspects, from building, configuring and running, of OX like machines to actually give me an idea about my current issue with my v2 xPro and its flacky Z driver : Could it be the on-board driver dropping its 'enable' signal ? Powering down the power supply (not the USB connection) might reset this signal to the driver ?? Having tested the driver with the X stepper showed it wasn't the stepper with the issue ... It is something on the xPro. I don't have gear to properly check the signal to the steppers, or even at pins on the driver to confirm... Of course, the issue could be inside the driver chip and there would be nothing I could do other than replace it anyways. But I'm going off the thread's initial question, which was answered a few posts back. Sorry.
Just a flash update on my situation - details over in my build. While reconnecting the v1 one last time to myOX, I noticed quite a bit of the extremely fine MDF dust in all of the tiniest corners of the xPro : around pins, etc. Just before connecting a 3rd USB cable into the xPro port, I kind of cleaned the connection points inside the USB port. There was thinnest layer of ... crud. Guess what !? Connecting the v1 ONLY to the computer, I have just 'ghost' ran over an hour of a 4 hours chunk of Gcode WITHOUT a single drop in the USB connection ! I'll see if cutting air gives the same results. The power supply, steppers and router will be on... A electrical interference might be at work. I doubt since nothing about the wiring has changed from before the issue surfaced to now ... Now that would be embarassing, especially for me, if that was my issue from the get go ... DUST As for the v2, and the question for this thread, it does seem to have a bad Z driver. Probably an issue from early on, but not noticed given so few jobs done on the C-Beam it came with ... I will be able to test a discrete / external driver to bypass this bad on-board driver in a few days. The worse case scenario will be to reroute Z to the A driver, quick solder job even I should be able to handle. I'll report back on the discrete/external driver aspect (alone) in this thread.
Specifically to the point of the question in this thread, a little bird told me : the step/dir signals are surface pads hidden beneath the ATX plug on the v2 xPro controller. So it will take some work to remove the ATX plug to get to those pads. I might not try a TB6560 with the v2 after all, especially if I can make it work with the A acting as Z. That's all I need for a C-Beam with only 3 stepper motors. The v3 xPro has those surface pads in plain view on the back side of the board. I haven't heard or seen anything about the v1 having any hidden surface pads ...
