I tried to do some thermal testing on the TMC2660 drivers. First I tried running my puny motor at 2A with a 60cm 5V fan blowing at the driver. This kept the driver quite cool, which was a not interesting.
I was planning to run all 3 axis at the same time, but my heat sink was just a bit too tall and was touching the other driver :-(. I ordered slightly shorter ones, but they have to swim trough the pacific ocean first.
While I was enjoying torturing the poor motor at it’s rated limit. The thermal camera picked an unusual hot spot on the board. The reverse protection diode was cooking quite a bit. Serves me right for being lazy and not doing the reverse protection the proper way. Even with only one motor running, the diode was dissipating quite a bit of heat. I can’t imagine in what world this part is rated for 10A continuous current. Maybe it needs a small refrigerator attached.
Anyway I changed the schematics to use a proper P-channel MOSFET and a zener.
I added a small cooling pad on the PCB to help the transistor cool off. Hopefully this will not overheat with full 10A load.
I also decided to test one of the last remaining circuits on the board – the servo connectors. This proved to be quite the challenge. There was a serious contention for Timer #7 on the micro controller.
First Marlin’s temperature control was set to use Timer 7. This was not making the Servo module happy. I moved the temperature module to use Timer 8. Then I found that the SoftwareSerial code was also trying to hijack Timer 7. Moved that to Timer 12.
Finally the servo was working properly. I was able to set the position with the M280 command. I decided to quit while I was ahead.
More next week.