# Help identify this board and power supply



## Cb750r (Jul 21, 2014)

Hey guys I've purchased a Taig mill, with a CNC conversion from a friend, the below is a photo of the power supply and the controller. Anyone seen these?  the Power supply says Skynet on it, but cant seem to find a part number

the Controller board has no info besides Version 4.0!

It works now but I'm considering some better stepper motors and I'm not sure if the PSupply can handle it.


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## countryguy (Jul 26, 2014)

The power supply looks to be a sswitchmode type supply.   As for current sourcing capacity and new motors- very hard to say?   The unit looks old and tired.   I used to repair hundreds if not more during my depot days!   The capacitors go dry very fast. Esri meter check will tell their woes. From the brown faded part of the unit I would say it is getting too warm.  The supply is from these guys.   http://www.skynetusa.com/

The 4axis controller with the heat sinks is unknown as well you note.   If there are no board marking of any type, you might consider removing 1 of the heat sinks (if possible) to do a search?  Something like the chip Mfr or chip numbers  and "4axis controller".    Just an idea


The short answer, if it were mine? And if running fine   I would leave it running till it dies then I would put in a power supply the controller mfr noted as tested and approved.  Sort of a matched and known quantity supply and controller pair to insure your old supply does not cause a problem in a new controller board.  


Just my 3cents!


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## rowbare (Jul 26, 2014)

The board looks like a Xylotex or one of the copies. A lot of these were bundled with Taigs, mostly with motors that were horribly mis-matched to it. It is based on an older Allegro chip. At was an ok board when nothing else was available but is very out dated now. It can only handle about 2 amps and 24-30 volts.

Don't go blindly changing motors without understanding what you have already otherwise you are just throwing money away. What is the rating of your current motors? Are they the old round can type or the newer square motors? Do you have any specs on them? The important specs for steppers aside from holding torque are current and inductance. From the inductance, you can calculate what voltage the motor is happiest at. The motors in a lot of the Xylotex packages were fairly high inductance and would have needed 80 volts or higher to run their best. That had a lot to do with the poor performance of a lot of those packages. 

Quite often smaller motors will give you better performance since power drops off quickly as the speed increases with larger motors. This is especially true when you have a fine pitched lead screw like the Taig does. Taigs perform really well with motors in the 160 to 225 oz/in range at about 48 volts. 

Depending on which motors you have already, you would probably get more bang for your buck by upgrading the controller and power supply. A Gecko G540 with a 48v 7a power supply is what I would recommend. Be wary of the eBay 4 axis packages from China. A lot of them are not very reliable according to threads I have seen on CNC Zone.

There are a lot of threads on CNC Zone on matching motors and controllers.  

If you post a picture of the controller box, someone might be able to recognize the package.

God luck and enjoy your Taig. It is a good little machine.
bob


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