Smoothiebard and External Stepper Drivers

Hi,

I am trying to speed up my 3d printer and wanted to add some external drivers for the x and y axis and am trying to get my head around the step-rate on the Smoothieboard. I bought a set of drivers (DM332T) that had a maximum step-rate of 60kHz and I could not get them to work... Setting microseconds_per_step_pulse to 8 would cause it to drop 25% of the steps moving 75mm instead of 100mm.

Looking at the Smoothieboard docs it say the base step-rate is 100kHz... Does Smoothieboard exceed the 100kHz step rate? Will Smoothieboard work with a Stepperdriver with a max step-rate of 100kHz?

Thanks!

Gray

Hi,

I don't think I am going to get any help with this as the only one who can definativly answer the question is the person who designed the board and wrote the Smoothieware... The information you can find on the net is incomplete... Suggestions of should work and may overclock are not super helpful...

Things such as the step-rate is up to 200kHz and step-pulse is 2ms, is more helpful in helping people find external drivers that will work with the Smoothieboard.

The step-pulse can be adjusted using the config setting: microseconds_per_step_pulse

I have seen a few posts in CNC forums about people using the 542 Type controllers (such as the DM542Y from Stepperonline) with Smoothieboard and I have ordered a few for my machine.

I hope this may help someone looking for information on this topic and I will post my results with the DM542Y Drivers.

Gray

Hi,

Last update here: The DM542Ystepper drivers from Stepperonline were pretty much plug and play... No need to change microseconds_per_step_pulse They were setup using common annode as here: Smoothieboard Docs

I am quite happy with the setup now and the machine seems to be working quite well...

Gray

Sorry for missing this post. Yes, Smoothie can do 100khz, and under some circumstances might work if you configure it at 120khz ( in particular you'd need to build a CNC version of the firmware with only 3 axes, see smoothieware.org/6axis ).
However, it's pretty much always easier to just set your micro stepping so the rate is at or bellow 100khz, and you're not going to see a difference in performance from the driver.