Was watching the 6th episode of The Blacklist and saw this board at the beginning of the show. Used in the prop bomb.

I had the same experience, mine smoked then caught a fire!

Hi. I bought 4 of these board. I just burned one and I really don't understand why. I hade one motor connected and I simply powered the board with 24 V/DC and it burned. Did anyone have the same problem?

This driver board was used as part of a bomb making montage on episode six, season one of the Blacklist TV show. At approximately 20s into the episode someone is soldering something to the board. Turns out the bomb is dirty (radioactive) bomb.

this board is garbage. i've gone through three of these with a former senior scientist in robotics at a national lab. stick with the 293's and 298's.

this problem isn't just with this product... i've had problems with other boards. sparkfun's product development philosophy is that it's okay to make money on products that haven't been fully fleshed out at the expense of their customers. but the fact is, this is not okay.

i'll buy breakout boards, but boards developed or endorsed by sparkfun are off the table for me.

sorry sparkfun, i like you but your engineering sucks.

I am looking to use three of these with a GRBL-arduino setup. It appears that will work ok per the GRBL documentations. However, I am wondering if I could change this up and get a parallel breakout card and then use these with a LinuxCNC/EMC2 setup. I am trying to be flexible in the design so I could move to LinuxCNC if I need the extra complexity. Anyone had experience in either of these configurations?

my big easy driver worked great for about a day. then the motor would just "stuter" when pulsed by the mega. have sent an email to sparkfun tech support. hope they can help

Does this driver works whit any dc motor or just stepper motors?

I bought this driver with the ROB-10846 motor. I am running with a plc to control step and direction. I hooked them up and had to play with the amp potentiometer. One I got that dialed in it ran like a champ. I have been running continuously for 8 hours and still all good.

Need one of these, but after reading the comments I'm not sure if I dear try. What it the best way to secure microcontrollers from beeing fried from one of these? Octocouplers?

Mine went silently. But took my uno with it. 12V DC down one of the io pins! Sparkfun is being really good about the whole thing though. Got to give them Kudos for that! Thanks guys for the great customer service. Much appreciated!

hi, might be a stupid question but it says the max motor drive voltage is 35V but if i have a larger psu then that will it burn the driver out? if so up to what input voltage can it accept?

I've managed to burn up two of these so far. Using a +5VDC 2A supply for the logic (shared with an ATMEGA88), and a +24VDC 7A supply for the motor power. Never unplugged the motor while powered. The first one made an audible pop before dying, after working normally for about an hour. The second one the A4988 chip caught fire while the ATMEGA88 was toggling it's enable sleep and reset pins. Anybody have a similar issue? I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out what happened...

Can I uses a 555 timing circuit as a pulse signal for this board or do I need something a lot more sophisticated like a pic micro chip?

Anthony

Recently I just bought a Big Easy Driver and a stepper like this https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10847. I connected 4 stepper wires(green, black, red and blue) to the BED. Then I connected to M+ and Gnd 12v. Also I ran a simple arduino sketch

void setup() {
pinMode(8, OUTPUT);
pinMode(9, OUTPUT); digitalWrite(8, LOW); digitalWrite(9, LOW); }

void loop() { digitalWrite(9, HIGH); delay(100);
digitalWrite(9, LOW); delay(100);
}

But the stepper didn't move or even jittered. I measured a voltage on AA and BB headers and it was equal to zero.

What I did wrong or it is a problem with BED?

I was really wondering how do I know the current im using to drive the motor?