My Gecko g540 just didn’t have enough I/O pins to handle all I want to do. I bought a UCCNC bundle deal from CNCDrive to meet my needs. I’m still using the trusty Gecko as my stepper driver board, but now have a new UC300ETH-5LPT and UCBB Dual Port Breakout Board running to my laptop via ethernet. It came with a UCCNC software license too, so I’m almost completely converting over. This is a big improvement and I now have 16 outputs & 18 inputs.
The problem I had for the past several days was trying to figure out how to hook up my Price AvHC10 torch height control to this new UCBB breakout board. The Price manual has 4 diagrams for various boards. None matched what I needed to do. I emailed Price CNC in Scotland, but I’m impatient. The UCBB manual didn’t cover it. Or maybe it did but was too technical and I didn’t get it. Forgive me if it’s in there but written in the Vulcan Electrical Schematic Language. I do not speak V.E.S.L. Nor have I ever visited their planet but I hear it’s warm there.
I set out this afternoon to figure it out on my own. The trick with this breakout board is that each input has its very own little isolated optocoupler. I don’t really understand all that. However, I do understand that each input needs to be powered from the power supply and complete a circuit to work. So I think of it as trying to link 4 wires together to turn on 1 little green light bulb on the breakout board. I’ve got 2 wires per input supplied by Price and a + wire and - wire from the power supply. After some trial and error, here is my high powered, professionally produced diagram on how to wire the Price AVHC10 to a UCCNC UCBB Dual Port Breakout Board.
The Price wiring is mostly twisted pairs of wires. Note the squiggled wires coming out of the AVHC10. They are pairs. Each set has a black wire and another colored wire. The diagram is color coded to match the Price AVHC10 colored wire pairs.These are only the ones that need to go to the breakout board. There are several other wires and pairs not going to this board, but the instructions for those are universal for all systems and easy to understand. I simplified the diagram by combining all the wires going to the power supply. For testing, that’s quick and easy. In reality, I’m running individual +- wires to respective terminal blocks for each input. So where I show 4 wires all combining into 1 going to the negative power supply terminal, I really have 4 individual wires going to their individual slots on a negative terminal block. Ditto for all the positive wires. It took less than 5 minutes to set up inputs in the UCCNC software. Everything tests out right. The diagnostics screen shows the proper green lights. The Run screen shown all the right stuff too. I couldn’t find this info anywhere so I hope this little bit of documentation helps someone out in the future.
All the best,
Scott Meer