Hardness building the last few days.. I chose a combination of .093 and .062 MOLEX connectors because I have a ton of them… and Vetco Electronics has a ton of surplus ones (at .59/.79 ea).. if you want to dig and find matches to… (hint, only like 10% of what they have has a matching gender…) I also bought about 50$ in pins and extra connectors as I know I’ll be using a ton of these. I probably should have bought more of them from digikey but I wouldn’t have ended up with the assortment. The real ugly purchase was my desire to stick with oil/moisture resistance MTW wire. I think it’s also known as appliance wire? Anyways it’s flexible, has nice thick insulation. Disclaimer: I have endless supplies of controls wire with is a low voltage 18 ga power limited wire. Usually plenum rated. … all that wire is usually free for me. This wire isn’t really acceptable.. I spent about $70 on wire and that was totally out of left field. I found a couple spools (~80ft) of it cheaper than new and Vetco has decent prices even compared to eBay so I did buy most of it from Vetco. There is a bunch more 22 ga if someone is looking for it, I wanted 18 ga.
The stepper driver is a CENTENT CN0142 I purchased off eBay for $40. It’s very easy to us. I don’t know if it’s not totally obvious but the “direction” and “pulse” signals are open collector. You’re supplying a ground to signal input and +5VDC to the input labeled so. Overly obvious.. well maybe. Rock solid stepper driver so far. I accelerated my Sparkfun NMEA23 motor from 2kHz to 14kHz fairly quickly in five programmed steps to get my speed up. Worked like a charm… lets see if i can still pull that off under more load.
Also of interest? I had to boot up an old Windows 3.11 laptop to use an old programming app for some super old controls. (Okay, not 1970’s stuff… but early 90s anyways). It’s been a while since I’ve seen that screen (photo below). I didn’t have a mouse but it magically came back to me pretty quick!
Making up harnesses with painfully expensive MTW wire.
