TMC 2208 Not recognized at all

Hi all,

I've just installed two TMC2208 drivers on my RAMPS board. I followed some very good step by step tutorial and I'm still not able to have it working.
What I did is as follows:

- Solder the pins on the driver. Original from Watterrot
- Solder the bridge pads for enabling UART communication
- Solder the pin for the communication heading uppwards
- Change the configuration_adv.h on Marlin (1.1.8) and enable all that is to enable: USE_TMC2208, Enable debugging, selecting the Z axis, etc
- Check the pins on pins_RAMPS.h and make sure they are available in my setting
- Make a Y cable with the 1KOhm resistor for the TX pin
- Hook everything up

No matter what I did, the motor moves twice as much as requested. Although I set up 1/16 microstepping, the same I had with my Pololus, I performed the reverse calculation to find out that the actual microstepping on the driver is 1/8
After more investigation, the issue seems to be that the Driver is not recognized at all by the Marlin/Board. Thinking that it was a problem with the TX/RX communication, I dig into the available info out there and I found that:

[github.com]

I proceeded to change the assigned pins for serial RX/TX, but everything is exactly de same.

I tried different Arduino (original), another RAMPS board and even the 1.1.x and 2.0 bugfix branches from Marlin.

It seems that the driver is on "legacy" mode and software manipulation is not possible. Although I went through the steps to enable it.


Any help would be much appreciated. Maybe I'm missing something?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2018 12:00PM by Hauser.

my steps/mm was off after I installed TMC2130's. seems the Marlin FW update did not override eeprom. once I noticed that I was over that hurdle. Had other issues, through in the towel and installed 2100's. Now its printing away and I have to keep checking if its actually still moving. What voltage are you running to the drivers? My TMC's were crap in stealthchop on 12v. powered the Vm/grd. with 36v and it is sweet as can be. I am down to less than 1 amp on 1.7 amp motors. good luck with your issues

Thanks for your response, @Bill Clark

I've never had the eeprom activated on my firmwares. I don't like it at all and I rather prefer to upload the firmware again than to have to navigate through the LCD to see what my values are.

I've been able to use the 2208's in Legacy mode. That is, not soldering the pads, and installing them just like regular Pololus with the RAMPS MS jumpers. The current is adjusted with the potentiometer. It takes away half of the sweet advantages of these drivers, but man, they are silent!

I contacted Watterott about the issue and they suggested to try them on legacy mode, which I already did. They told me that if the drivers work in legacy mode, the problem must be software related. I'll be opening a bug report on Marlin's GitHub page.

Curiously enough, though, I installed the 2130s on the X and Y axis and they worked right away with no issues.
My power supply is 12v and I'm mostly running at 800 mA on each motor with the default Velocity, Acceleration and Jerk values that come with Marlin. I will try to step them down together with the current.

I remember DC42 mentioned a significant difference between the 2208 and 2130. But I don't remember. It's stated somewhere in the stepper-subforum