I started playing around with the images i’ve scanned and with a little GIMP magic i was able to create a useful overlay image.

And here we go with part 2 of my DQ860MA reverse engineering project!

As announced in one of my last posts i will try to reverse engineer the DQ860MA. Unfortunately i realized that the PCB is a 4 layer PCB, which makes it way harder to get a schematic.

So as a start i will get a list of all components.

I use clonezilla a lot to load images onto computers or create backups of them and it was always a hassle to enter the same values into the diolog over and over again. Unfortunately the documentation is not the very best.

Anyway, with a lot of googling and trail and error i finally got a semi automatic configuration.

You have to modify 3 files for booting EFI machines as well as BIOS based ones.

I’ve bought 4 large stepper motors and 4 DQ860MA drivers on ebay a few days ago. Unfortunately one was faulty from the beginning. The seller sent me a new one winthin 2 days which is awesome, but the best part is that i hadn’t to return the damaged one!

So i decided that there are pepole out there who for sure are interested in a teardown :-)

I posted a video on Youtube showing how I connected a Smoothieboard wired to a Yaskawa Sigma 2 AC-Servodriver with a 400W Servomotor. Afterwards I got asked to show more details and that’s why I write this blog post.

I had two identical computers of which one had a damaged Windows 7 installation that refused to boot. The other was a spare machine for that case, but unfortunately it wasn’t updated for about 2 years. So I had to install about 200 Updates which was really annoying.

After all the updates were installed I decided to make an image of the up-to-date computer and restore it on the damaged one.

Since I’m a big fan of open source tools, I wanted to use one and decided to use Clonezilla. The biggest problem with Clonezilla is that it does not support creating images of Software/Fake Raid’s/Firmware RAID’s according to their website.

My computers both have 2 SSD disks with 120GB each configured as RAID1. The RAID controller is the one provided by the Intel X79 chipset of the ASUS P9X79 Pro Mainboards, which is a Firmware RAID.

Last week i tried to read and write data to and from a SICK FlexiSoft Safty controller which has a Modbus/TCP gateway.

Because i had a lot of trouble to get that up and running i decided to write a few lines about i managed to solve my problems.

My MateDealer project was entirely written in C because the Arduino IDE or more detailed the HardwareSerial part lacks the 9-bit support. It is easy to send a 8 bit data frame, but nearly impossible to do that with 9 bit frames. I worked for a while on implementing 9-bit support for the Arduino IDE and recently i finished my work!

I’ve recently bought a few SparkFun ProMicro 5V 16Mhz clones from Ebay because they are extremely cheap (7 Euro each) and habe native USB. The only problem i had is that i was not able to program them using inotool.