Stepper motors

Good evening,

I use a Unimat SL lathe for my hobby of repairing longcase clocks. I accept and embrace the fact that it is very small lathe but it is ideally suited for my purposes.

The only complaint I have is the 0.8mm thread pitch on the long travel screw. When working on 150mm pieces it gets very tedious.

I am motorizing this with a stepper motor and have purchased a NEMA 17 motor, DM542 driver and FTVOGUE controller with stop/start, direction and speed control.

Everything is fitted and works fine, the motor drives the long travel carriage as desired but there is a problem.

When I press stop, the red alarm light on the driver comes on. It's a constant on while ever the motor is stopped. This driver can report three alarm conditions but none of them are a constant on.

I cannot find anything on the internet to explain this. The voltages from the controller to the driver are all within limits, switching between 0.5v and 4.5v as instructed.

Could this simply be that pressing the stop button, which is actually the Enable/Disable function, disables the driver hence putting it into an alarm condition.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. My electrical knowledge doesn't extend much beyond the Red to Red, Black to Black, Blue to bits level.

kindest regards,

David

My guess is that the constant red when the motor is stopped is expected behaviour and nothing to worry about.

I have a WS55-220 BLDC controller. Different function, but it looks similar. On mine when the motor is running the "alarm" light goes green. When stopped it goes red.

Can you post a link to the controller and the exact DM542?

Is there still current to the steppers? It might just be to tell you that so you don't think it is off, don't just unplug things, maybe risk overheating something.

Could it mean that there is still power to the motor, but locking it in the current position? Without power some steppers turn reasonably freely.

Good evening,

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

I don't know how to post links to anything on this site, sorry.

The driver is a POLISI3D Microstep CNC and the signal generator is a FTVOGUE PWM Signal generator, both purchased from AMAZON.

The motor is powered down during the alarm condition.

As everything works fine I'm coming to think along the same lines as mentioned above in that the light comes on when the motor is stopped just because it does.

Kindest regards,

David