Hey there! I’m new to the forum and have an (almost working) lowrider 2 machine in my garage! I had a quick question regarding the series stepper wiring vs. the dual endstop.
My plan is to get the machine working without endstops first, but to add them in shortly after (to help get everything square). I have the individual wiring kit from this site and am curious what the best way to hook up the steppers is (to make adding the endstops easy down the road)?
It looks like the dual endstop firmware uses two endstops on the x and y axis but only one on the Z? It would seem to me that the Y and Z axes are the two that would need alignment more than the X?
Do most people tweak the firmware to square up the Y and Z axes instead of the X? If this were the case would it be easier to wire two seperate stepper drivers for the Z axis instead of wiring in series?
Just trying to gauge how most people set up there endstops to minimize work down the road.
The dual endstops really are only for the mpcnc, not the low rider. We are working on building configurations for the low rider, but they really aren’t needed, because if you just start the LR square, the motors will keep them aligned, because they move in lockstep. The MPCNC has 2X and 2Y.
You can wire your double axis in series, it doesn’t reduce the quality or anything.
If you want to wire them to separate drivers, you have to configure those.
Thanks for such a quick reply Jeff! I suspected the references to X and Y dual endstops might be because it was designed for the MPCNC. I actually was able to go in and modify Marlin to hook the two Z motors to separate drivers, and it looks like it’s mostly working. I’m getting something sort of weird though where the motor being driven by what was the E1 driver is working great, but the one being driven by the Z driver doesn’t have enough torque to move the gantry (switching the motors confirms it’s not the motor). I also swapped the driver with a working one and the issue remained (confirming it’s not the driver either) Any guesses as to what might be causing this? I suspect it might be either my ramps board or firmware related? It’s definitely got me a little stumped. The driver Vref is identical on both. Thanks again for the help! You guys rock!
Well after digging into it even further, it looks like the root of the problem is that the recycled Nema 17s I was planning to use just don’t have anywhere near the amount of torque I thought they did. They just happen to be right at their operating limit, enough so that very small variations in the operating conditions can stall the motors (no way they stand a chance with the router running). Looks like I’ll be ordering new steppers…any suggestions? As high torque as I can afford I assume…anything else to look out for? Thanks again for the help!
The stepper motors in the shop, or the amazon link in the parts page. They don’t have to be huge.
Some boards have two Z motor positions. You don’t want to use those, because they are wired in parallel. But since you said Ramps, I assume this isn’t the case.
Hey Jamie, you’re right, there are two parallel plugs for the z-axis motor. I’m not using those though, so I don’t think that’s where my issue is. I actually started a new thread regarding my low motor torque, since the topic has kind of diverged from what my original post was about. That thread is here: Really Low Stepper Motor Torque
Thanks for helping me out! Everyone here has been very helpful!