RAMPS with bigger beefier drivers

Hi,

I've been trying to build a bigger faster reprap and keep running into the torque issue and the small nema motors we are using. Has anyone used the RAMPS electronics and all the goodies it provides but used a different stepper driver? I'm thinking of 380oz nema 23's @ 48v. It sounds like a lot of torque and it is. But I'm aiming for ultimaker speeds with a gantry style bot with the extruder mounted on the gantry. That's a ton of mass to be whipping around so I want to over kill it on the prototype.

No real reason why you can't just pull out the Step and Direction signals from the ramps board where they would normally enter the pololu carrier and just running them to any other Step/Dir motor driver chip (Almost all are step/dir anyway).

You should also obviously be supplying the 48v separately to the drivers, and feed RAMPS its 12v.

Shouldnt be much hassle,

Buy beefy driver
Buy beefy power supply
Connect up and go really...

... I'm driving my CNC-mill (NEMA23-motors) with a RAMPS 1.2 - the drivers are 6Amps@70Volts-types ... and previously tested other drivers with 2Amps@325Volts, and some NEMA56-motors with 3Amps-1/256 microstepping-drivers without any problems too.

You only need inputs capable of 5Volts and TTL levels.

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Something like this should do it [www.ebay.es]

Just bear in mind that optocouplers might make step pulses narrower, which might cause some steps to be lost. If that were the case, beefier outputs would be needed for driving the optocouplers.