For the past two days, I have been having some adventures with stepper motors. First I needed to try and get it working with the part sorter. In the process of doing so, I broke the Makerbase controller that I was going to use for Slidemap. I still had the Ramps 1.4 controller as a backup so I ordered Makerbase another and switched to that to do my Slidemap testing.
I got the stepper motors in that I was supposed to use for Slidemap and then realized that I had ordered the wrong ones. The ones I ordered were not 0.9 degrees per step and did not have enough torque. So I revisited the drawing board and look
ed into ordering stepper motors with gearboxes. It allows for much higher precision of movement with the one downside of having backlash because of having play in the gears. This isn’t that big of a deal for Slidemap because unlike 3d printers the movement we are performing is pretty consistent. With these steppers, we can get up to 1 micrometer per step! This should produce a very smooth very slow movement, perfect for Slidemap.
I will have to modify the existing design slightly to account for the added length of the gearbox but it’s not a difficult change and all the parts currently being used should remain the same. In the meantime, I will work on writing a custom G-Code API with python that will be used on the google coral and make sending commands extremely easy.
This stepper motor is moving at 32 mm per minute (its max and smoothest speed) and that’s without even using micro-steps. If I used 1/16 microstepping I could move at 2mm per minute with reduced max speed.
Also tonight I was working on the G-Code API for python. I got a very clean class structure that allows me to send a few G-Code commands currently but it can be expanded to allow for more control. For my application though I really dont need much more than linear movement and homing. I am back to using the Marlin firmware and will not be using Grbl because Marlin does everything I need it to do and in the end is simpler to use.
Devin Willis 