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Powering up the Ultratronics v1.0 Pro

A project log for Building the Thor robot

Building a 6-axis robot based on the Thor robot. When size DOES matter!

olaf-baeyensOlaf Baeyens 12/27/2016 at 01:570 Comments

I am moving at a slow pace because I have a lot of learning to do with stepper motors and the Ultratronics v1.0 Pro controller board.

The documentation of the Ultratronics v1.0 Pro is yet again confusing. When I bought it, then it states that it supports both 24V and 12V power source. I want to go to 24V.

But when I got it in my hands,it has 12V written on it and the documentation talks about a 12V jumper to set.

The confusion is that there is also a second heat-bed power source intended for 24V and then you start to doubt if they mean a 12V power source for the motors and controller + second 24V power source for the heat-bed only.

The last thing you want to do is fry the controller with 24V source while it only accepted 12V source.

Rereading the documents did not make more sense so I took a gamble.

Because they talked about a 12V jumper, I removed the 12V jumper (below in the image)

Then wired up for the 24V input source. (I am not using a Heat-bed for this project) so I did not wire this one up. I powered the source on and nothing happened. No lit LED.

So I cut the power, connected the USB cable and happy to see that the controller still worked and I did not fry it.

Rereading the document several times over made me assume that the 12V jumper is not a switch between 12V and 24V but a choice to use power from the "power in" source or not.

It would have been clearer if they did not call that jumper "12V" but "Power in". Because I feed it 24V not 12V.

The documentation did state that when I use 24V then I must hook up devices that can support 24V instead if 24V. Measuring the headers that are marked 12V on the board actually now has 24V on it.

Whoever the headers that have 5V and 3.3V does have the correct 5V and 3.3V.

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