1/8 step with pololu - woo nice and quiet

My goodness!!

I have upgraded my extruder stepper driver from the Gen3 h-bridge hack to a Pololu stepper driver with 1/8 step and I am barely aware that the extruder is running, with only the sound of the gears meshing being heard. (Not to mention that nasty whine being absent as well)

I have my Y-axis on a pololu stepper driver drop in to replace one of my G3 stepper driver boards but always used it on 1/2 step mode. Once I discovered how quiet my extruder was at 1/8 step mode I decided to run the Y-Axis on 1/8 step mode and it is also much quieter.

I am now tempted to replace the X and Z axis G3 drivers with Pololu drivers as well. The machine will then be so much quieter!

Only problem is the waste of cash where each G3 stepper was about £32.

So is there any benefit in driving the extruder or axis steppers at 1/16 rather than 1/8? Any performance benefit at all?

Cheers

I Know! it's a world of difference, I need to open the door now to hear if it's still running.

Depending on what micro and firmware your running you may find it starts to struggle with all of them at 1/16.

I run all my axis and extruder at 1/8 and I can't think of a benefit using 1/16 other than being even quieter. If you do run them all at 1/16 you may need to turn up the current limit to maintain speed/torque and check cooling on you'r Pololu's

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

I use Pololu's on all 4 axes with TZ Gen 3 remix. I run the x and y at 1/8 steps and the z at 1/2 step. My extruder is set to 1/2 step surprisingly, the e_steps_per_mm is twice what I calculated it should be for 1/2 step. I'm not quite sure why this is.

I found that when I set the extruder at smaller than 1/2 step, it can't retract/restart fast enough and I get comunication errors during retracts/restart. I think that the the x and y are the most important ones to set at microstepping mode. But setting it to 1/16 limits the feed rate so I backed them down to 1/8. There's no real need to use microstepping on the z-axis and it would probably have the same problem as the extruder with communication errors during z steps if set too high.

brnrd Wrote:
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> My extruder is set to 1/2 step surprisingly,
> the e_steps_per_mm is twice what I calculated it
> should be for 1/2 step. I'm not quite sure why
> this is.

The Gen3 electronics and firmware are 1/2 step as default, so maybe your calculated figure was based on them being full step (200 steps) rather than 400/rev, I made the same calculation mistake when first using Gen3.

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[richrap.blogspot.com]