Native vs Interpolated microstepping?

Hi all,

Since a day or two I've been playing around with my TMC2208 drivers and 32-bit board, however, I am not finding them to be as quiet as on my other printer that is running on 8-bit.

The stepper drivers are installed correctly and have every option that needs to be active already activated.

Now, I am wondering about the microstepping. Since I have a 32-bit board. Is it better to set the native microsteps to 128 or should I still let the interpolation do it's work? I feel like since I'm using 32-bits I might be better off setting it to native resolution of 128 microsteps but I'm not sure if it will matter anyway. I know I have to also multiply the steps/mm if I change the native microstepping.

Might this also help with noise?

Edit;
I now see the TMC2208 even allows for up to 256 native microsteps.

Update:
Changing my search criteria I managed to find a couple of answers, the solution is to keep using interpolation instead of native microstepping because even a 32-bit board cannot supply enough steps to power four drivers in native microstepping.

Sources:
[forum.duet3d.com]
[www.reddit.com]

Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2019 06:15AM by Ohmarinus.

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

It does depend what board you are using and what speeds you are working at.

My main experience is with RepRapFirmware and Duet systems. From the forums discussing those boards I have seen most settle on using interpolation, but there are cases where it makes sense to try controller driven steps. Noise isn't one of those reasons though. In RepRapFirmware the status command returns a hiccup count from the board which if I remember rightly lets you know the number of times the controller has been late on issuing commands.

Finally the disclaimer! I'm running v0.6 Duet boards and it's been a long while since I played with V2 duets and only have a pile of bits to emulate a V3 duet.

Currently trying to get tiny minatures looking reasonable with 0.1m layers and a 0.4mm nozzle. 'fun'!

It mostly depends on the speed you want to move the mechanism. If you're trying to go fast, you use interpolated microstepping. If you're moving slow, you can use real microstepping up to the pps limit of the controller.

In my sand table I use uninterpolated 256:1 ustepping even when I drive the mechanism at 1000 mm/sec to erase the table. I can do that because I mechanically step up the motor rotation speed by 5x with belts and pulleys.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]