Collaborate Disseminate
Last time I tried to convince you that, if you haven’t already, you should try running your 3D printer with Klipper. There are several ways to actually make it work. …read more Continue reading 3D Printering: Switch and Klip(per)
It’s official: [Engineer Bo] wins the internet with a video titled “Finding NEMA 17,” wherein he builds a dynamometer to find the best stepper motor in the popular NEMA 17 frame …read more Continue reading Putting Some Numbers on Your NEMAs
Over the last 2 years [Carl Bujega] has made a name for himself with his PCB motor designs. His latest adventure is to turn it into a stepper motor by adding position control with microstepping.
The NEMA stepper motors most of us know are synchronous stepper motors, while [Carl]’s design …read more
Were tarot card readers deemed non-essential in your part of the world (and do you think they saw it coming?) More than ever, we all need diversions that are for entertainment purposes only. And what better basis for entertainment than a mystical fortune-telling robot that can read your tarot cards? …read more
No matter how fine your fine motor skills may be, it’s really hard to manipulate anything on the stage of a microscope with any kind of accuracy. One jitter or caffeine-induced tremor means the feature of interest on the sample you’re looking at shoots off out of the field of view, and getting back to where you were is a tedious matter of trial and error.
Mechanical help on the microscope stage is nice, and electromechanical help is even better, but a DIY fully motorized microscope stage with complete motion control is the way to go for the serious microscopist …read more
Continue reading Motorized Stage Finesses the Microscopic World
Adjust the phase current, crank up the microstepping, and forget about it — that’s what most people want out of a stepper motor driver IC. Although they power most of our CNC machines and 3D printers, as monolithic solutions to “make it spin”, we don’t often pay much attention to them.
In this article, I’ll be looking at the Trinamic TMC2130 stepper motor driver, one that comes with more bells and whistles than you might ever need. On the one hand, this driver can be configured through its SPI interface to suit virtually any application that employs a stepper motor. …read more
Continue reading 3D Printering: Trinamic TMC2130 Stepper Motor Drivers
Stepper motors divide a full rotation into hundreds of discrete steps, which makes them ideal to precisely control movements, be it in cars, robots, 3D printers or CNC machines. Most stepper motors you’ll encounter in DIY projects, 3D printers, and small CNC machines are bi-polar, 2-phase hybrid stepper motors, either with 200 or — in the high-res variant — with 400 steps per revolution. This results in a step angle of 1.8 °, respectively 0.9 °.
In a way, steps are the pixels of motion, and oftentimes, the given, physical resolution isn’t enough. Hard-switching a stepper motor’s coils in full-step …read more
