I would like to get rid of the cable chaos I have from all the stepper motors, and plan to replace them with 4 pole cables instead. So I have a couple of questions.
Do they have to be shielded?
I have the steppers wired in series right now, but I plan to add endstops in the future. Is it a good idea to add long cables to each motor and connect them in series “right before the RAMPS board”? Right now I have the “series connections” inside the pipes and stuff. Might be much more convenient to have the connections more close to the board for accessibility.
Since there are many cables, it doesn´t hurt to shield them.
I do not have series, nor RAMPS, but if you are planning to change setup in the future, my idea would be to use long cables so you do not need to redo your work ?
One suggestion from my side: do not cut the cable to short, close to the stepper motor, just in case you would need to resolder it.
Most LowRider builds do not use shielded cables and work just fine. Every once in a while we see a forum topic that turns out to be an electrical noise issue. Typically we see a noise issue if long cables are used for the LCD and, occasionally, we see a noise issue with the endstop wires. The endstop noise issues can be solved by either increasing the noise threshold in the firmware or by adding a capacitor to the endstop circuit.
If you want endstops in the future, I’d either do a six conductor wire bundle to each stepper, or a pair of bundles, one two conductor for the endstops, and one four conductor for the stepper. That way you would have all the wiring done for the endstops when you get around to it, and it is easier to figure out now while you are redoing your wiring than to have to figure out how to add endstop wires later.
As for wiring to the control board, you can do one of 1) use the harness you currently have at the control panel, or 2) create your own, short serial harness (the wiring diagram can be found on this page), or 3) update the firmware to dual endstop and wire all the steppers to individual drivers. You don’t have to have endstops to use dual endstop firmware…you just have to have a driver on your control board for each individual stepper. If you have five drivers on your control board, I would suggest doing #3.
As for the wire itself, I couldn’t figure out the specs (probably because they were metric). You want to make sure that the conductors are big enough and stranded, and I don’t know how to compare these specs and the US specs that I typically deal with.
Thank you so much for your experience and insights.
Running 6 conductors is smart. Thanks for that idea.
One concern I have is that I gather all the wires at one spot (the left side) and then run them through a cable mesh/measuring tape thing which is quite tight… I fear that replacing all wires with 6 conductor cables will make that measuring tape trick too messed up?
I used 6-conductor shielded cable on my Burly since I had it on hand, and I ended up with (I assume motor) noise on my end stop connections. I solved it by adding capacitors to my CNC Shield end stop connectors. The Rambo or other boards may be better at rejecting that noise, but if I had it to do again, I would do a test with 4-wire cable for motors and 2-wire shielded separate for end stops.
From what I recall in my readings, the only time shieling is needed is if you’re planning to use a plasma torch. Then all bets are off, and you want to faraday cage all your electronic bits and bobs. Otherwise, as mentioned by others, you may end up fiddling with touchy endstop signals, and strained LCD connections, but those are mostly limitations of the hardware (either fiddly, knife-edge trigger signals on the endstops, or the inability for the LCD screen to connect on cables longer than a rat’s… tail).
Oh, and general superstition (along with rally hats and not changing socks while the Cubs are winning) is that running a grounding wire in/around/through your dust collection is good juju…
Figuring stuff like this out now is one of the main reasons I suggested doing the endstop wires now rather than waiting to later and having to potentially tear out all of the work you are about to do. Sleeving come is different diameters, so that is a possible solution. Cable chain, which is what I use, also comes in different sizes. I use cable chain with the “flat” wiring Ryan sells, and It works well for both the stepper motors and the endstops. It sounds like you are running all the connectors for all the steppers through a single sleeve at some point. If so (and I cannot picture why), you may want to break it up into two sleeves with two tape measure sections.
Sounds good to me, but I’m only a hobbyist when it comes electronics. The serial wiring harness Ryan sell in his store is AWG26 and the dual endstop wiring AWG22, so your wire is between the two.
I am late to the party but I’ll add my two cents. Most of the times that I thought I had noise/interference in the cables turned out to be loose wire connections. One time turned out to be a burned out stepper motor (Extremely Rare but I was pushing too much current). And one time the AC cable for my DW660 was too close to the Z stepper motor cable. That was the only actual interference. I solved that by moving the AC cable.