Are the 17s thw largest motor the jackpot can run?

Im guessing the drivers will burn up wirh a higher amp draw, or am i wrong?

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TMC2209 is an ultra-silent motor driver IC for two-phase stepper motors. Its continuous drive current is 2A and peak current is 2.8A.

The Jackpot doesn’t care about the stepper current, your drivers do. We are set up for tmc 2209’s but there are other options. You can even do external drivers and go as big as you want.

If you give more context to the questions I might be able to guide you some more.

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The maker space i go to has an old xcarve with random electrical issues in its massive driver/ controller cabinet. It’s running nema 23’s iirc, wondering if the box could be replaced with a single board

If you get a chance, open up the driver/controller cabinet and take some pictures. Knowing what components are in the cabinet would be very helpful in providing you guidance.

When I did a search for X-Carve electronics, I found the original version uses an Arudino UNO for the control, and uses a grblShiled v5 for the stepper drivers. Neither of these are very big, so I’m not sure what is in the “massive driver/controller cabinet.” The only bigger item was a larger power supply.

External drivers are common when driving Nema 23 motors. The cheapest I’ve seen are the TB6600s, and they will work with the Jackpot board and any Nema 23 motors. Of course, using external drivers does not meet your goal of a single-board replacement.

The beast…



And the shapoko running similar looking steppers. It’s not my machine so i didn’t pop the cover on the black box. The owner wouldn’t care but he wasn’t there either.

Side-note: My Primo is soooo sooo quiet now. No noise from the drivers or steppers. My TB6600 are waaaay louder, as are the steppers with it. Incredible what those tiny things can do.

Interesting electronics. I seriously doubt this is X-Carve original electronics. It looks like someone retrofitted electronics designed for a larger machine into the X-Carve, but that is only my guess.

It would be really helpful to get the model number off the Nema 23 stepper motors. This will help determine how much current the stepper driver much handle, and with that information, we can figure out if there is an on-board stepper driver solution or whether you will need to use external drivers.

The four labeled components down the left side are the stepper drivers. The board on the upper right is interesting. It is designed to maintain a fixed RPM of the spindle under varying loads. Most of the better routers (like the Dewalt installed in the picture) will do this internally, though you will have to set the dial manually at the beginning of your jobs. If you were trying to simplify things, it is one piece you could do without.

It is beyond my personal understanding of the potential issues, but there are drop-in stepper drivers that will handle the current of most Nema 23 motors, like this one. Assuming a driver like this would work, you could replace everything in that cabinet but the power supply with a Jackpot board. Even the power supply looks like overkill.

Its a mystery rig, ive been told it was donated as is and ive been told it was bought, so who knows. I know its not the original intended electronics though and with its random behavior its an issue. The xcarve control box is is around $600, but it sure seems like it could be a $100 fix with something like the jackpot.

Its a very small issue since its just collecting dust. There is only 2 of us that do cnc and we both use machines at home. The other guy brought in the shapoko after he bought an upgraded model. I spent a lot of time on the xcarve and it made a lot of expensive scrap wood unfortunately. I was happy to move on.

The last two pieces of information you need before you can design a solution are 1) the model of the stepper motors, and 2) the voltage of the power supply.

The stepper model will allow you to figure out how much current your stepper driver must handle.

The power supply voltage will drive whether you can have an all-in-one board solution. You’d have to ask Ryan for sure, but it is likely the Jackpot board will be limited to 24V. If the power supply is greater than 24V, then you will either have to either 1) replace the power supply, or 2) use external stepper drivers. There is a small potential benefit to running at higher voltages, though I expect the machine would run just fine at 12V.

In addition to what others have noted, I’d add that an important consideration is exactly what are the …

For instance, if it randomly stops in the middle of a carve, it could just be a poorly grounded limit switch shield and might be fixed by something as simple as tightening down a screw on that “CNC USB Controller” board. Or, it might be a limit switch itself, in which case replacing the entire cabinet wouldn’t even fix the problem. Before I spent any money on new hardware, I’d take an hour or so and go through the wiring to make sure all the connections are tight.

It’s behavior is random. It will be 2.5 hours into a 3 hour cut, the exact same cut (think a cut-through) that it has done a dozen times, and It will just hang a 90 and decide to cut through 2" of solid wood.

I’m not planning on spending any money on it, it’s the makerspace machine. I’ve spent enough hours trying to troubleshoot it before I built mine, and gotten no-where with it. Someday if they get rid of it for cheap, I’ll pick it up and just replace the electronics entirely. Until then I’m just thinking :slight_smile:

Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a loose wire. Driver or controller issue no doubt.

A few years back I built a machine with some larger motors and used some DM542Ts to drive them. They’re currently about $30 apiece on Amazon. If I were to guess, I’d think they are a direct replacement of what is in that makerspace machine. Used an UNO to control them (also similar to that USB controller), but if I were to do it again, I’d use something like the Jackpot instead of the UNO. Much easier to configure and the built in WiFi is nice. Although, if you want to piece together your own controller, I think all you need is a $5 ESP-32 running FluidNC plus a $2 SD Card adapter.