Hey guys, I just found this video on youtube:
[youtu.be]

In there, someone explains how to setup your stepper drivers and such... But, he's doing a lot of things wrong with the electronics. It's mostly about handling.

For example, he just plugs in and pulls out the stepper motor while the power is on and the stepper motors are being moved. This can end up very badly for your stepper drivers/Ramps. Also, these weird extension cords have a higher chance of having a wire falling out of the Ramps board, especially when you're moving it around. Such a loose wire can then ofcourse hit another trace on the board and short it, for example.

He does seem to know something about electronics, but I don't feel like such a video should be on the web, because people who have no experience and think this is the way to do it might end up with broken parts on the board/stepper drivers.

Should someone tell him? I don't have Google Plus, so I can not react on the video to warn new Ramps users.

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

There are more than one comment about blowing the stepper drivers due to pulling the plug hot. He even acknowledged that it may have caused some of his own fried drivers, and promised to annotate the video to include this warning.....

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vreihen
There are more than one comment about blowing the stepper drivers due to pulling the plug hot. He even acknowledged that it may have caused some of his own fried drivers, and promised to annotate the video to include this warning.....

You mean in the video? Sorry, I was watching it on my mobile phone, so I couldn't scroll through them quickly. All I saw were comments about how great the video was on my mobile phone..

Still, I think he should redo the video because some people don't read comments.

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

Quote
Ohmarinus

Quote
vreihen
There are more than one comment about blowing the stepper drivers due to pulling the plug hot. He even acknowledged that it may have caused some of his own fried drivers, and promised to annotate the video to include this warning.....

You mean in the video? Sorry, I was watching it on my mobile phone, so I couldn't scroll through them quickly. All I saw were comments about how great the video was on my mobile phone..

Still, I think he should redo the video because some people don't read comments.

or descriptions for that matter

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This video is certainly informative and interesting for developers, but to mere users it likely gives the impression adjusting Pololus is rocket science, requires extension cords, a scope and whatnot. I simply wouldn't link to it when explaining motor current adjustment.

In case this video actually wants to instruct on adjusting motor current, it also misses an another point: adjusting motor current with steppers on the table is pointless. The purpose of steppers is to move carriages and current has to be adjusted to make sure motor torque is sufficient to move these carriages reliably. The resulting reference voltage is secondary, it's not even neccessary to measure it.

The other strategy to adjust motor current is to set it as high as possible without overheating the steppers (and raise acceleration/speeds accordingly). In this case the ideal motor current depends on the particular motor in use.

All this despite many instructions on the net which advise to set V_ref to some magic number.

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