Hello, I am here again seeking for advice. I bought RAMPS 1.5 board with TMC 2208 UART enabled drivers. I have more questions so I address them separately.
————————— 1. My TMC 2208 drivers from Bigtreetech came UART enabled and it seems there is a resistor already soldered underneath where the pads are soldered together, does it mean I only need one extension wire for each driver?
2. How to wire the UART extension wires and what’s the setup in firmware? I read that they should be connected to AUX-2 pinout and assigned a specific pin number for each axis (X_CS…)
3. As I am trying to follow Leon’s footsteps (Brauns CNC - on youtube) I want to power my drivers with 24V 3A PSU, the rest of the system with 12V 6A PSU. Can I plug it (24V PSU) directly into RAMPS board ? (I checked the capacitors and they are rated for 36V). What does it mean exactly to “power up drivers separately” ?
Sorry, you’ve asked questions I don’t know the answers to. These are questions I haven’t seen here before, about hardware combinations I haven’t seen here before.
I have read this entire thread and it seems I have the same problem as this guy - exactly I get displayed “TMC CONNECTION ERROR” when defined drivers are TMC2208, when TMC2208_STANDALONE is used there is no error but also no UART feature.
He mentioned he got new, good drivers. Is it possible mine are faulty? I ordered them from bigtreetech (TMC 2208 V3.0, UART enabled) and they came pre soldered (I suppose) but there isn’t just soldered pads, they put some kind of resistor over it… Can someone explain please?!
The resistor may be just an easy way to wire that closed. They make R0 resistors, which have zero resistance (they have some, but near zero).
Configuring it for stand alone means it will stop trying to talk over uart at all. So you won’t know if that works or not.
I would start with one slot, enable tmc debug, and carefully check the wiring, and the uart pins for that driver. If M122 can get that one driver to tall over uart, then you have a socket to test each driver, one at a time.
Okay I managed to fix it… I would have never thought it would be this… So I measured the cables with my multimeter and I found one out of four wires was without continuity (Yellow RX side) I removed the connector and there was no wire attached to the dupont connector, it was crimped onto rubber! I fixed it and now it works!
Now X and X2 are working fine, only Y and Y2 show error… tried to switch UART wires between X and Y and it didn’t work so it’s probably not in the wiring.
Tried to switch X driver with Y driver and X still works fine, Y doesn’t. (i mean I can move axis normally etc. only UART isn’t working) I got these TMC 2208 as pack of 5 (already fried one) and they all have soldered pads. I removed all jumpers under drivers except Z axis which has DRV
It sounds like you’ve checked the drivers (all good) and the config on two ports. Maybe the pins aren’t right for the other two ports, or maybe they aren’t wired into the right spots on the board?
And not having motors shouldn’t affect the M122, but if you enable them, you should see ola olb errors (open loop a/b). In my experience, it won’t notice until they are enabled.
I will try with my other Ramps 1.5 board (which I also fried while messing with TMC2208 but it somehow works). I am currently running ramps 1.6+ (Bigtreetech) and man they have terrible support… Maybe the pins are different indeed. we’ll see. Meanwhile I post what they replied to me, that I can’t UART on mega 2560 only on re-ARM 32bit (maybe there are some different pins on that re-ARM) Can’t find data sheets for that board
I don’t have the cycles to deep dive into the schematic and pins file for this board right now. I know the TMCs don’t chat too much, so you don’t need a dedicated hardware serial port for them. I think there is a “software serial” setting that needs to be set, but I think that is configuration wide, not on each driver, so if it’s working for X, I doubt that’s the problem for Y.
This plethora of boards is awesome, but if you don’t have someone else that has already set it up for what you want, then you have to do a lot of homework and the information always seems to be 75% there, and the last chunk has to be interpreted. You’re far from the beaten path here, I’m afraid.
Yeah, thanks for you help anyways. I know a lot of people use SKR boards for TMC drivers as they have dedicated pins for UART (just adding jumpers).
Update: okay, I defined only X axis, connected it on ramps 1.5 via UART and it worked. Then I powered it off, moved driver to Y. I left RX/TX pins the same only changed them for Y_SERIAL_TX/RX_PIN. And again the same error as on the ramps 1.6+. I assume there has to be something wrong in the software because:
Driver : is okay
Wiring : is okay
Basic firmware mods: are done
I don’t completely understand your setup but I have read several times in the past that you cannot power RAMPS boards with 24 Volts without modifications. I believe the mods are fairly easy to find on the ‘net. I have played in the past with ReArm boards but found the pinouts were incorrect (for what I was trying to do).
Hi @markBear Im also planning to use RE_ARM with 2208 and RAMPS 1.6 so did you managed it to work,
I saw somewhere that AUX-2 is no connected to RE_ARM and you need to use those pins thats SCL on SPI for X_SERIAL_TX, SDA for Y_SERIAL_TX, E1-DIR for Z_SERAIL_TX, E1-SREP for E0_SERIAL_TX
