I am looking for a way to send more Amps to my steppers.
I have (2) 84 oz-in NEMA 17 motors on my X, wired in parallel. I considered wiring them in series. Has anyone tried this?
I see external stepper drivers, but most of those are a lot more money than an A4988 for not a lot more Amps. It also required mounting a lot more boxes in my electronics enclosure.
This project uses a break-out board to let you plug up to (4) A4988 boards into a socket meant for one of them:
Has anyone tried it?
Are the boards available without custom ordering my own PCBs, then stuffing & soldering them myself? I would much prefer 2.54mm JST connectors over screw terminals.
I am posting this here because the board looks like it might be a great addition to many of the projects V1 Engineering sells. I have no affiliation with the creators of this project, who do not seem to be maintaining the HackADay page. I am not making a cent on this. I just want to find a cheap way to push more Amps without blowing out my stepper motor drivers.
I’ve wondered about this as well. Would connecting a stepper driver to a load switch, and letting the load switch carry the higher amps to the target stepper motor work? Seems like that would be both easy and cheap to construct.
On MPCNC I am using 2 TB6600 drivers (each for around 10$) and running my steppers in parallel. The machine got some additional torque after moving to TBs (was lazy to do the math what Ryan recommended) and lazy to rewire steppers in series. On one of my printers, I have 4 Z motors and 1 TB6600 runs 2 pairs of motors in parallel, each pair in series (one A4988 could not do it).
Thanks! External stepper drivers look like a better option than an Arduino-board connected to a shield-board connected to multiple-duplicator-boards connected to multiple-driver-boards.
Problem solved. You can pair TMC5160 stepper drivers with your own mosfets to drive up to 20amps to your stepper motor.
Taken altogether, this sounds like a really good setup. I assume that with this gear you can just tell the motor to go at maximum speed all the time and let it decide (through monitoring) what that speed should be. No more under-performance or endless tuning of parameters. And if you want to go faster, you can install bigger motors without fear of running past the amp limits of your drivers. What’s not to like?
To me, “problem solved” means I can buy the setup off-the-shelf for a few dollars. I’m a Career Technology Education (CTE) teacher, and need dzens of cheap drivers for my students to use. I often pay for these myself. (I’m not complaining. I love these projects.) I do not want to build custom PCBs to get a project (or 10) working.
Not loosing steps is critical. That’s why I want to crank up the amps. Reliability is critical, so I want drivers that can easily handle twice the Amps I am putting through them. I do care about noise and micro-steps, but those are not critical issues.
I am thinking about a connector from the RAMPS 1.4 / CNC Shield v3 socket that is supposed to take an A4988 that goes to an external stepper driver (TB6600 or similar.) That makes it more idiot-proof (student-proof?) than soldering wires. I would still connect the +V and Ground to the screw terminals to drive the steppers. That would give me nice 4.5A driver. I need to do more research.