Short Curcuit

[papermaker]

I was tidying up the wiring inside the enclosure of my cnc mill when I experienced a shot curcuit that took out the breakout board. I ordered and installed a new breakout board and installed it. The X-axis worked normal. The Y-axis did not work at all. The Z-axis worked but it traveled in the same direction when either up or down button was pressed. If I unplug the X-axis motor and plug in either the Y or Z axis motors into the control for the X-axis they work correctly.

The controls for the breakout board are fed through a parallel port. With the parallel port unplugged and the power to the breakout board and stepper drivers turned on I get the same result. The X-axis motor locks up but not the Y and Z axis motor do not.

The electronics supplier where I got the breakout board thinks that the short circuit may have shorted the parallel the parallel port. But I think it seems that the breakout board is faulty seeing that I have the same symptoms whether the parallel port is plugged in or not.
I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.
Jerry

 

[Oso Rojo]

Parallel ports are not that rugged. I've seen a few of them blown out when used to drive things other than printers. They often don't have any protection on the driver circuits.

Do you have another computer you can use to test the breakout board?

Also maybe use a program like this;
http://parallel-port-viewer.soft32.com/

to try and manually manipulate the port and read the input. This may give you some insight on what is happening. That program is not one I've used, but there are a bunch of them available on the net.