5 stepper motors, 3 position encoders and 11 Input bits

[steveastrouk]

Our first tests with the Kflop/Kstep board have been successful, but for our production system we want to distribute Step/Dir to 5 motors remote from Kstep - and we need one more channel than we can get with Kstep anyway. In addtion we need to read three position encoders, and listen to 11 limit switches. There is enough I/O on Kflop to do what we need, but on JP26, I only see pins to talk to 3 axes. Can I reprogram I/O to be the other channels I need, or do I have to have multiple Kstep boards ?

[TomKerekes]

Hi Steve,

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you want to use KStep or other drives? Are the "5 motors remote from KStep" in addition to KStep or instead of KStep?

KStep JP26 is a connector on KStep as an alternate method to feed 4 Step/Dir signals into KStep not outputs.

There are several choices to multiplex devices to other alternate connectors, but in general hardware devices (Step/Dir Generators, Encoder Inputs, and PWM Outputs) can not be arbitrarily configured to any pins.

To have a total of 5 Step/Dir outputs and 3 encoder inputs you might:

Use 4 Step/Dir Outputs on KFLOP JP7
Use 1 Step/Dir Output on KFLOP JP5
Use 3 Encoder Inputs on KFLOP JP7
20 General Purpose 3.3V IO are available on KFLOP JP4 and JP6

Note it is usually a bad idea to use 3.3V non-isolated IO for limit switches. Its better to use 24V opto-isolated wiring using a device such as our Konnect Interface.

[steveastrouk]

Thanks Tom,
We want to replace Kstep with remote circuits. You've given me the topology we need to carry on.
We will be optoisolating our limit switch circuits.