Gen7 DIY Stepper Driver

Hi!

I'm a DIYer and about to make the Gen7 board myself. At the moment I'm thinking about the stepper drivers. I'm not a 100% satisfied with the Polulu drivers, 1st because its not DIY and 2nd because they're really hard to source from Switzerland and not very cheap.
There are several DIY stepper drivers in the internet, but I was not able to find out what would fit with the Gen7 board. I guess it needs the Axxx chips? They are really hard to source too. Did someone make their own steppers? Is there a DIY project that could be used?

thanks!

In principle, any stepper driver with STEP and DIR inputs and sufficient power to drive your motors will work with Gen7. If you want to keep to the Pololu form factor, that probably means using one of the Allegro or TI chips, e.g DRV8825. There are a variety of sources for Pololu or similar, ebay has many.

If you want to make your own board, there is StepStick. I have done a version of these using A4982, which are slightly easier to solder (Sango-bc). I am testing 2nd iteration, I need a 3rd to fix some layout errors. There may be some open designs using DRV8825/DRV8811.

Going away from Pololu form factor, There are several designs using TB6560, e.g. Phoenix has mature design, also the winner of the recent competition Maket-city.

Stock of the Allegro chips can be very patchy, but Digi-key seem to have thousands, I did consider putting in a bulk order but I eventually got a few through from a UK supplier. Finding TI chips or TB6560 may not be so easy either, perhaps the question to start with is what chips can you get hold of easily? Then the question is what level of DIYness and cost you are comfortable with.

Thanks!

I like the maket-city TB6560 drivers, since this chip is very easy to get. I'll look into this idea, but I still want to use the original Gen7, so I'll look what could be done with this chip. I also don't like that the enable line has to be inverted in the code, because I'm sure, someday I'll forget that after an update and burn the drivers. But this could also be solved with hardware.

Thanks!

Looks good, this Maket-city design. Funnily, "Gen7" starts to become a synonym for "DIY-able electronics"

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Traumflug Wrote:
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> Funnily,
> "Gen7" starts to become a synonym for "DIY-able
> electronics"

Wasn't that the idea?