As told I have a RAMBo 1.4a from V1 Bought a week ago ( I have not even turned it on yet)
I have Nema 17 from “Here” I have the “17HK4401” ones.
I am trying to wire them up to ethernet keystones, but I have not been able to figure out the best and safest way to do this I have the + and - mapped out the I keep seeing things about Parallel and Series and I am unsure which is the best/safest for the RAMBo board. (is it going to pull to many amps or not give enough power to the steppers?)
I am not sure what firmware I am running as I have not turned out on yet (just bought it a week ago)
I dont have endstops as I am told that just complicates things for noobs like myself.
I am running Windows 10
Thanks for any help you may provide as I am at a wall right now =)
There are two basic ways to wire up to ethernet jacks. Since the motor only needs four wires and the ethernet cable has eight you can pair wires up, using each twisted pair for one of the stepper wires, or you can use half of each pair for each of the stepper wires and leave the other half disconnected. There’s little to no functional difference between the two options.
With a RAMBo 1.4a board should I just wire them together in parallel or in series? and how would I do that in an ethernet Keystone? Sorry wiring without cooking stuff is not my strong suit.
I don’t know about the series or parallel but I do know you need to make sure to use stranded wire, you should also use one twisted pair to each wire so that the jack pins are doubled up. I think some of my connection issues were shorts in the jacks.
I used the ethernet jacks at first and was quite happy with them.
But then I rebuild my machine to make it larger and they gave me nothing but trouble. Even replaced them with new jacks thinking maybe the terminals were worn from having been used previously - and bought a real punchdown tool to make sure the wires were seated properly. But they just didn’t work reliably anymore.
I was using a pair in the cat5 for each wire to help with current carrying but the big problem was the stepper wires were thicker than the ethernet blocks were really designed for which made getting reliable connections tough.
I gave up and went to soldered connections and haven’t had an issue since.
Yea, each keystone goes to a motor. the other end of these photos go to the ramps/Rambo board. Each stepper has a keystone that looks like the blue keystone on the first picture, though check your wire pairs, they could be different color combos. Pretty sure there’s a circuit board on oshpark that does this already, I just have the networking tools to do it myself.
I am trying to join the Axis together and have say the X-Axis on one cable and the Y-axis on another. I am trying to make it as clean/easy as possible.
I remixed this to fit my keystones and am just looking at the best/correct way to wire them. Or should I just use this oshpark board and just slide it in the conduit then wire the output to my ethernet keystone using it as a quick disconnect/dust shield?
Ok guys don’t scare me. I did wire my build using these keystone cat5 jacks. One keystone per axis. I used one pair for one set of coils and wired them in series, so I have 4 contacts unconnected and free. The leads of my steppers are 24 gauge same as my cat5 cables so I figure it would hold. I must not have run it enough.
I used both pairs for redundancy. If you think about it, the actual metal to metal contact inside the keystone and rj45 connector are pretty small, so wire gauge isn’t really an issue.
