Well I made up my mind that these drivers I got are too small power wise, so I think I did screw up, but I want to reply to the last two posts first.

On the G540, you can adjust the current by adding resistors. But it's okay for steppers to run fairly hot.
Oh do you mean the resisters that the manual says to use for the amp rating of the motor?
When I did the setup on the 540 I just followed the directions and used what was needed for my motors (3A), so if I wanted to put less amps to the motors I just need to figure out what resistor would work for a lower setting, like if I wanted 2.5A instead? If I'm understanding you right, good then I'm not as dumb at this as I thought and I learned something too.

As for the motors getting hot with the 540, they would get quite warm and the X would get really hot, like you couldn't hold onto it very long hot. I know these motor make heat but I'm use to "heat kills electronics", so that's way this always bothered me.



Do the motors lock up when the power is on? In other words, they should be hard to turn by hand. Perhaps your current is set too low. The vendor's instructions are sometimes incorrect.
Yes the do have resistance, now I didn't get on them hard to see how much it took to make them turn. As for the current I did try different settings, but it didn't make a difference.




OK after messing with it a little last night, I really think I bought the wrong drivers for this setup.
Here's what I messed with. In Mach "motor tuning" I kept lowering the "steps per" and after a few tries I got the motors turning to move everything, but it was set so low that it would move about 2" and the DRO would show like 5" to 6" of movement, and when I raised the "steps per" the motors stopped turning again.

And after screwing with this and getting frustrated too, I said hell with it and started looking at drivers again on the net. After a few hours of reading and comparing drivers I started searching for deals, which took a while longer. My eyes hurt after all that. LOL
I was going to get larger ones from ATI and these are priced $50-60 each for standard drivers in the 50-60v range, and $80-100 for digital drivers in the same voltage range.
But I found a set of new Gecko G210x drivers (80V-7A max) on ebay for just under 120 shipped per driver, most places wanted 135 and up + S&H on top of that. So these brand name drivers ended up only being a few bucks more then most 50-60v digital drivers from other places, I know these don't have the bells & whistles like some of the others but at least it's a brand name with a good reputation.
OH well, make a mistake and learn from it I guess.

Hopefully I'll be able to sell those 36v drivers for close to what I paid, or try to find a new project to use them on, hmm maybe a table top gantry router HaHa


Thanks for all the help, and I will come back to let you know if the new drivers work