Before committing to my tests I thought I'd make sure I could make the motor turn. I wired up the motor and trio of boards. The screws were quite small so I had to use a jewellers driver. I connected up the power supply, set it to 9v with a 0.5A limit.
I fired up the IDE and it immediately reported the there was old firmware on the Eval board. I took the attitude of "what's the worst that can happen" and clicked on the Firmware update button. This asked me to select a file and I had a look around the installed folders but there was no firmware to install from there. Looking around the menus I found "Download Manager" so I selected that.
Clicking on the Firmware tab produced a list of URLs, so I followed the Landungsbrueke one and downloaded the latest firmware, "Landungsbruecke_v3.06_BL.hex" Then back to the update firmware to select the downloaded file.
That installed fine so I headed to the velocity mode and tried to get the motor to move. Nothing happened to start with so I rebooted the board and tried again. This time the motor did move.
I've not yet worked out what the velocity setting is measured in, perhaps steps per second? It seemed to be running ok so I dialled it up to 100,000 and got quite a lot of vibration from the motor. The powersupply seemed to be behaving erratically so I incremented the current limit to 1A. This didn't seem to help and I noticed that the voltage measurement had increased to 9.2v so the powersupply seemed to be fighting it constantly to regulate that. Reducing the speed back down to 10,000 sorted things out. So for my testing I'll be running it at these lower speeds.
So I'm happy that I can get the motor to move using the IDE. There's quite a lot of parameters and terminology to learn but I believe I have enough to get my testing done. If not, Trinamic so far have been really helpful in providing the cable for the encoder, so I'll just ask for help if I need it.
The firmware process seemed a little convoluted given that the IDE knew what board I had, what version I needed and where to download it from. It could have joined the dots for me and just installed the file.
The fact my powersupply was affected by the board was slightly worrying, perhaps a real world design might need bigger smoothing caps, filtering or just a different type of supply?
