More Windows 10 Weirdness

Since upgrading to Windows 10, I’m still having some weird issues… one thing that particularly annoyed me was the long delays when creating and renaming folders. After renaming a folder, Explorer would sometimes take about 10 seconds to respond. The fix for this issue was:

  1. In Windows Explorer, select the View menu.
  2. Click the Options button on the right hand side (not the drop down).
  3. On the General tab, under Privacy, untick both of the “Show recently…” and “Show frequently…” Quick access options as pictured below.

This fixed the slow renaming issue. The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure that I disabled these options before and they seem to have enabled themselves again?!

I’ve also got another really strange problem I can’t understand. Occasionally, I’ll boot into Windows and some of the apps won’t start – they just freeze up or hang on the splash screen. For example: Chrome, Calc, Outlook and nslookup (on the console) freeze and have to be force closed but, weirdly, others like Notepad and Excel just start fine, and ping and tracert both work. Multiple restarts don’t cure it.

Purely by chance, I found a way to fix this by rebooting the PC into Ubuntu Linux (it’s dual boot), shutting Linux down and rebooting into Windows 10. Simply restarting Windows isn’t enough, I have to actually shut down, log into Linux, then restart into Windows 10. I cannot understand how/why this fixes it…

UPDATE: I eventually discovered that holding SHIFT when shutting down Windows 10 makes it do a full shutdown, and a clean restart then cures the problem. This still happens to me occasionally… irritating.

TB6560 Stepper Motor Driver versus GRBL

For a while now I’ve had an old TB6560 Stepper Motor Driver board kicking around, which never really saw much use. I used to drive it from a PC parallel port (remember those?) with a very big, ugly old desktop PC running LinuxCNC. Because of the size, this was pretty inconvenient. Recently, I decided to resurrect it and try to drive it from an Arduino Uno with GRBL. It took some time to find the pinout online, particularly since there are several variants of this board with completely different pinouts, so I decided to make notes here…

This manual appears to correspond to my 3 axis board: (TB6560 3 Axis Manual) and here’s the pinout that I’m currently using successfully:

LPT1 PinLPT1 FunctionArduino PinGRBL Function
1X Step2Step Pulse X-Axis
2Y Enable8Stepper Enable
3Y Direction6Direction Y-Axis
4Z Direction7Direction Z-Axis
5Z Step4Step Pulse Z-Axis
6Z Enable8Stepper Enable
7X Direction5Direction X-Axis
8Y Step3Step Pulse Y-Axis
9Spindle Motor12Spindle Enable
14X Enable8Stepper Enable
25GNDGNDGND

This works but these blue TB6560 boards are absolute junk and have numerous well documented design flaws (e.g. skipping steps) which require DIY modifications to fix, so if you are considering buying one… don’t. There are plenty of better options available!