Are NEW stepper motors better than OLD ones?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Hey everyone, long time no see!! I'm really sorry; that long hiatus was not planned (explanation at the very end of the video)... That said, this video was quite the journey!! I really look forward to seeing what you guys think about the results I got! Here's the GitHub repo: github.com/ChronicMechatronic/Stepper-motor-benchmarking

[@TheOriginalEviltech]

Maybe the rewiring the motors had some negative effects too.

[@mausamrajahirwar6742]

i need some help of your

[@jesselewis4975]

I started out watching this video thinking to myself, " 50 minutes , no way I'm gunna watch this whole video " . Boy was I wrong. Super hard worker. Well Done.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thank you, that's some of the highest praise I can get 🤗

[@romanlubij52]

Oh man, an hour of stepper shenanigans? Sign me up!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Can't tell you how happy it makes me to get comments like this after having spent the past 2.5 months working on this monstrosity 😅

[@sq3rjick]

I absolutely love deep dives like this. I’m weird. The longer the video, the more interested I am. Your test rig is impressive and fantastic. I love the solution of using your phone. That’s super clever!

[@zafindraberahonaJCA]

Hi Benjamin! Surprisingly the topic is pretty interesting, not boring at all. I watched it on KZbin on TV and didn't interrupt ads to help you, modestly, get some cents from your hard and instructive post. Using a laser and photos to evaluate stepper motors, is IMHO a proof that you're a real engineer with natural reflex like designing your own tools and measurement devices. Those 51 minutes are consistently useful to cover the purpose. Keep it up Benjamin! Btw your workshop has been through good lifting... I hope it sounds English 😉Merci Benjamin! On attends tes posts avec impatience et les prises de vue et le rythme de tes vidéos sentent de plus en plus professionnels. Il y a certainement beaucoup de travail derrière. Bonne continuation Ben! Le coup du laser est génial malgré quelques difficultés.👍

[@Hogla287]

First off, great high quality video. Second, a custom wood 3D printer in a basement?! You must be bed leveling that thing every time it rains

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks! Haha, more like scraping rust off the leveling screws every time I want to level, with how wet it's been down there over the entire past year or so... It's been very consistently moist though, so I don't actually level that printer any more often than the off-the-shelf one upstairs - which is to say _almost never_ 😂

[@CimboAkinci]

Watch the 3DP videos everything on that device is spring loaded lol

[@mysecondaccount7887]

First step is the hardest

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Aww you ruined the "first" comment 😂

[@mysecondaccount7887]

@@ChronicMechatronic Well I got the seal of disapproval to show for it!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

@mysecondaccount7887 😂😂

[@goodboiadvsp3297]

Bro saw the lack of documentation and said "fine, Ill do it myself"

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I was surprised and disappointed! From electronic components I'm used to anywhere between 3 and 40 pages of datasheet, so a single page with like 5 lines of actual information on it seemed abysmal

[@2ndAttemptPOG]

Idk how this hasn't blown up yet hmmm... might wanna try the A/B thumbnail system.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I have no idea, based on everything I know from past videos it should've totally been a banger, but so far it's only 4 of 10 and on a head-to-head race against my last one (which wasn't particularly successful) Saying I'm disappointed is an understatement.. I guess it might be because the comparison style thumbnail is a bit unusual for my channel so regulars don't immediately realize it's me. A/B thumbnail testing is on, just not with very different versions. Well see, maybe it gets some traction in the algorithm later if it manages to figure out the right audience...

[@2ndAttemptPOG]

@@ChronicMechatronic Yeah Title/Thumbnail change might be needed ngl mostly the latter I think tho

[@SubwayToSchiff]

@@ChronicMechatronic Honestly the first 15 minutes with the hunt for sheets was really tough to sit through, not sure how many people bounced after a while. Absolutely love the learnings, immediately motivated me to tinker around a bit more with my klipper setup and tmc voltages :D

[@benjaminmiddaugh2729]

​@@ChronicMechatronic And yet, the algorithm brought me to your channel because of this video. So things can't be all bad.

[@sq3rjick]

@@ChronicMechatronicI am subscribed and have notifications on and I didn’t get the video on my feed until 19 hrs after it was posted. I always click through and watch completely. There’s something in the algorithm and it’s probably punishing for a lack of uploads. It’s very frustrating and I’ve heard a lot of other creators having issues recently, as well. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out, improve, and share to more people.

[@jamespray]

37:57 was worth the price of admission. I'm guessing this is probably THE most common cause of gnarly VFAs, BUT this would have to be pending similar testing with a less crappy stepper driver to eliminate the control variables.

[@TheChillieboo]

Man i love the process here! something ive wanted to do for a while but you actually done it!, excellent pacing and info

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I'm so glad people like it, given how much work it was!

[@802Garage]

The visual representations of microstepping here are incredibly valuable and useful for teaching. There are graphs of this on some company websites for example, but they don't really show the deviation quite so clearly. This really shows the massive impact current and voltage can have. Also surprising how well some of the generic motors did. This was a super fun video to watch and thanks for all your work. Shared with a bunch of friends. I do have to ask, what the heck is your accent? Deep Canadian? Thanks again!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed! I'm happy if that work helps someone; it somewhat justifies weathering out those awefully repetitive data processing tasks... From what I can read here in the comments, much of the accuracy deviation might ultimately be caused by a driver quirk and avoidable by using a different driver, but that'll have to be verified by further testing...

[@802Garage]

@@ChronicMechatronic Would be interesting if that is the case! At least it would be verifiable with just a few tests. It would also be useful info for anyone with this or a similar drive. Would love to see that confirmed or disproven.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

@802Garage yeah, I really might have to spin this off into its own series it looks like

[@802Garage]

@@ChronicMechatronic 🙌 Now time to test the same motor with a bunch of steppers. 😂

[@ChronicMechatronic]

@802Garage yeah I was thinking that! I also really need to do the torque curves still, since those are gonna be the most useful in determining what to use each motor for...

[@foosinn]

It would be interresting if modern tmc drivers have better results at lower currents? Are you up for one more testing round?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Uuhhh - not sure I can handle another day of these repetitive data acquisition tasks 😂 I have some spare TMC2209 now, after ordering them around the time I talked about it in the video - I'd have to rebuild the StepOtest with the UART control added to automatically set the current. At which point it might be worth exploring different ways of doing the test altogether so I don't have to do all the tedious photo processing afterwards.. Quite a few people here seem to agree that ultimately the inaccuracy at low currents was mostly caused by the driver actually; someone mentioned a decay mode in the A4988 chip which should apparently be tuned to the stepper motor and is set to a "relatively suitable" value via a fixed resistor on the stepstick board. Really regret I didn't dig into the A4988 datasheet now...

[@boltvalley3076]

Thank you for this, I need this for the Robot with friend's project. also we were learning in the university. Many thank you.

[@ewasteredux]

I really like the stepper motor tester you built.

[@bustin1253]

I'm trying so hard to figure out his accent. It sounds like a Scandinavian accent mixed with southern United States accent. Sounds pretty cool.

[@eldonad]

At various points in the video I noticed French writing, so maybe something to do with that ?

[@nonsuch]

It's far east coast American, anywhere from North Carolina to Delaware. Definitely near the water.

[@MaxQ10001]

Wow, this is amazing. So thorough and still interesting throughout. I’m impressed. And I have never seen a French creator with perfect English. I just assumed you had to be Canadian. Well done!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks, haha. To be fair, culturally I'm probably more american than french at this point, so you're not far off on the mix!

[@ABaumstumpf]

"Run at as low a current as you can" is basically a direct admission that the person has no clue what they are talking about and has never in their live bothered to actually read and follow the spec sheet. Stepper-motors are designed to be run at a constant current - and to run rather hot due to that. Even the cheap chinesium ones provide a datasheet with the needed information. In professional applications you will find something along 65% to 85% the current rating to be in common use (warehouse belt-drive often goes down to 65% cause there microstepping or accuracy is not needed - you just want to move some conveyor rollers to like 50° accuracy). Where precision is needed of course it also needs better parts and you get closer to 90%. (Not an electrical engineer - studied it, worked with them, still controlling them, but now exclusively on the software side... we still need to know how they behave)

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks! It's great to have insights into how things are done in professional applications, since _there_ it's usually for a good reason!

[@cactus445566]

I think the step spacing being affected by current is because of detent torque; without current the stepper rotor tends to lock into alignment with the permanent magnets in the stators. You can feel this if you turn the shaft when it's not powered. So when it is powered, the torque that's being generated to get the rotor into position has to fight against the torque from the permanent magnet trying to get the shaft to lock into one of those positions, and at lower currents the ratio between these two will be lower, so the detent torque is more noticeable, while at higher currents the holding torque is larger and effect of detent torque is less noticeable

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Very good point; I hadn't thought of that - I don't think it's the reason though; otherwise, the microsteps would be biased towards the full step positions and not the half step in between?...

[@cactus445566]

@@ChronicMechatronic Good question, maybe the equilibrium point is in the middle instead at the full steps? I couldn't find much info online, a lot seems to suggest it rests at the full step locations like you're saying. I guess it'd be easy to check with your setup by seeing where the laser ends up pointing with the stepper unpowered

[@dekutree64]

Fascinating results! Now I'm curious if my CNC would be better or worse if I changed from NEMA23 to NEMA17 steppers, since the 23's are obviously not running at full power on the little A4988 drivers. But I've never seen any evidence of resolution being an issue, so I don't really care to mess with it. I never even checked the current settings on the drivers until now. X and Y are set to 550mV, and Z is 800mV. I'd planned on upgrading the drivers whenever the big motors killed them, but here it is 5 years and hundreds of running hours later without issue. I do have heatsinks on the driver chips and a fan blowing on them, and am running on 12V from an old ATX power supply.

[@sq3rjick]

You’re better leaving the 23s and upgrading your drivers. TMC drivers can be had for a few dollars each and they’re much better than A4988 drivers. You can also bump up your rms voltage from those conservative numbers. Those look like defaults for 17s and 23s need more power.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

It is! We've had some discussion on the difference between motor sizes on the Patreon Discord - generally, the bigger the stepper motor, the more inductance it has, simply as a function of physical size of the windings. The more inductance, the higher you'd want your driver supply voltage to overcome the "drag" and get high speeds. Bigger CNCs always run at ridiculous voltages, I think for a NEMA 23 you'd want _at least_ 24V, if not 36. At least that's how it's supposedly done "the _right_ way" lol. As long as it works, anything goes. Though I agree with @sq3rjick on using bigger drivers, the NEMA 23s should easily handle 2.5A regardless of voltage, so a TB6600 would be more suitable I think

[@victortitov1740]

BTW, your method of testing with reflected laser and long exposure pictures is very clever, nice job. But man you talk a lot....

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks! Yes, my talking a lot is a standing joke in my family, I just can't seem to contain myself.. I understand it can be tiring!

[@LowxyNova]

thanks for cogratulating me on finting the one frame that was not censored. i appriciate that

[@ChronicMechatronic]

🙃🙃 I ended up deciding it was a bit cruel for anyone not on PC, so I added an uncensored view at the end of the video as a thanks for everyone who watched the whole thing :D

[@rungstroem]

I'm not sure, but it almost seem like it is a problem with the driver rather than the motors. And I'm basing that on the results all showing a smaller distance between steps towards the half-step point. It should be really interesting to compare a TMC and the other driver on the same motor, current, voltage setup

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yes, the general consensus seems to be that it's the driver, not the motor! Someone who seems like they know what they're talking about says there's a pin on the A4988 chip allowing to tune the decay (don't ask me what exactly that is) to the specific motor, and that on the step stick driver boards this pin is set to an approximate value suitable for the typical voltages and currents NEMA 17S are run at

[@CimboAkinci]

Hoş geldin kıral gözümüz yollarda kaldı

[@mustafizsiam1506]

Bro's alive let's goo

[@ChronicMechatronic]

😅

[@heinerml2]

0:42 congrats

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Easter egg ;) Cause know it's pretty much impossible to find that single frame unless you're on desktop and know the keys to scrub frame by frame

[@must_titan9556]

Yo yo i was wainting ur new videos! Lets go watch. Greate video, congratz!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I'll try to be a bit more frequent with my uploads this year 😁

[@must_titan9556]

​@@ChronicMechatronic Very Nice job in this vídeo, congratz from Brazil!!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thx!

[@miestermind]

Your a hero. and this is so interesting! so now im going to take some of this into consideration!

[@patrichcerpa2923]

A question I've always had!! I get all my steppers from machines I collect or buy them at a antique market (called "Persa Bíobio" in Chile) where there are many machine disassemblers and I've always wondered the same thing, even more so today with so many Chinese steppers of dubious quality floating around and most of the old engines being of Japanese origin. Please continue with the channel, I love it, I feel at home with your videos that practically represent my same interests and material conditions XD. PD: I hate short videos!!

[@sadeqqsm8157]

Thank you I learned a lot from these 51 minutes.

[@jaapjan06]

That was a nice little video! I actually have a box like yours with steppers of all kinds, including smaller Nema 14's and weird step sizes, some from ewaste. I considered doing some tests-- but maybe its an idea, for next time that is, to put a magnetic encoder with high precision on the tip and use that for your automated measurements?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Thanks! "_little video_" haha. Good point, I considered something like that pretty early on but figured I'd never find an encoder with a high enough resolution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. To resolve those 1/16th steps at any meaningful detail I'd need the sensor to have an angular resolution of at least 2 orders of magnitude higher than the 3200 microsteps. That's 0.001125 degrees, which seems near impossible :(

[@joelsoncdma]

A lot work! Thanks for share.

[@antonio.stefanelli]

I've a lot of this old stepper motor from old printers, than wait the next video for result!

[@mikejones-vd3fg]

Fascinating! So if you overclock the steppers you should get more accurate steps and better prints? by overclock i mean add more current, maybe add some cooling so you can without overheating. That would be cool. Sorry im not an engineer and cant consult you on these problems but I have been learning on the youtube home shopping network and zoyi makes a nice inducantance tweezer meter, maybe if you reach out they can send you one. I mainly got it for the better resistance resolution vs multimeters, only like $30. It was handy to test my homande inductors and see how a core affects them. That being said ive been learning a little about motor control, just to see if I can make my escooter motor spin. And theres more ways then just PWM, Chatgtp was talking about FOC , field oriented control, a fancier way usibng derivatives which is more efficient, smooth across a wide range or loads etc etc, used in high precision robotics and industrial machinery. So why are we using stepper technology we were using in 30 years ago today? Linear motors... thats the future, basically a rail gun axis, your toolhead/hotend moves like a magnetic train. I think the difference is that its a closed loop system, using encoders to know its position like hall sensors, unlike steppers which use an open loop system, relies on the built in steps to know your position which cant be as good as using a magnetic field for fine control i think. Your steps are only limited by the resolution of your ADCs at that point. Anyway these stepper motors are good enough i suppose but are they really, we still dont have printers that can stack layers prefectly on top of each other. Why cant we have some kind of closed loop system on the Z axis, to compare to the actual position and adjust so youre go exactly straight up. This feature would be built into linear motors, but if you have to use steppers, you could still ad a closed loop control to make sure the motors steps match up with the actual position in real space. Youd just need magnets on the axis that moves and read hall sensor values and know its exact position and now youre steppers can get to the right spot everytime, instead of relying on accurate steps. But its cool to see them get more accurate as current increases, so just add more powa! work harder! not smarter! jk (do the opposite ;))

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I don't think there will be much of a noticeable difference on a 3D printers - at least between running the steppers at their rated current and above - but under-running them definitely seems like a bad idea... I've always wanted to make a 3D printer work with normal DC motors in closed loop like you see on inkjet printers these days with the optical encoder strip. Ultimately I don't think there will be any real merit in it aside form the novelty factor, seeing as getting custom controller boards made will easily eliminate any cost advantage, so not sure if I'll ever bother. Although it's something I expect 3D printer manufacturers to come up with before long, given the current trend towards closed-source non-user-serviceable machines. Once 3D printing gets ubiquitous enough they'll sure want to shave those couple pennies of stepper motor off the machines just like paper printer manufacturers did years ago. Back to the stepper motors though, the general consensus here in the comments seems to be hat the inaccurate steps at low currents were mostly caused by the driver, apparently there's a decay mode that's set via a resistor on the step stick driver board, which might have something to do with behavior at different currents - really regret not digging into the A4988 datasheet in hindsight, as there's a lot of science behind stepper motor drivers. If that's really the case, just using a different driver should yield totally different results and all my fancy testing was for naught 🥲

[@freednighthawk]

Would be cool to know the coil wire gauge/diameter for each motor. That would help explain some of the oddities.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yes it would! Though it's actually not advisable to disassemble stepper motors for a reason I only came to realize over the course of making this video and didn't get around to mentioning. I explained it on the github - basically the air gap between rotor and stator is only like 0.1mm all round, and it turns out without a special jig or something it's almost impossible to get everything aligned correctly again so the rotor doesn't scrape on the stator.. I'll have to cover that in a different video eventually.

[@victorvan261]

Muito bom mano, tambem estou com um monte desses motores de passo retirados de impressoras antigas, ainda nao testei eles.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

Nice one. But try with a good stepper driver next time, like the TMC2209. Last I checked, thay have overcurrent protection as well. As for the camera, move it back and zoom in as far as you have optical zoom to remedy the distortion.

[@foosinn]

If you are building another printer I would not recommend using the stealthburner toolhead. It's quite complex and has too little cooling for PLA. Have a look at the Dragonburner, Anthead or A4T Toolheads they are simpler and very effective. A Sherpa Mini or Sherpa Heavy extruder can reuse the extruder parts if you already have them.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Good point, first time I heard that - never considered that they might not have cared about cooling as much seeing as Vorons are designed to handle the fancier filaments that don't need as much cooling.. The complexity is exactly why I went with the Stealthburner - and the esthetics - I'll never be able to design anything as sophisticated, compact, and good looking myself. That said, at this point I mostly need to get the design done so I can get started on the video series. Replacing the print head with something that works better but looks less cool is something I can always do afterwards...

[@CimboAkinci]

+1 for dragon burner

[@TheHectorOg]

Bro! I used those same high inductance in a mpcnc, like, 5 years ago. They worked absolutely perfect, even better than the hanpose and usongshine you have ( i have 2 of each). But i used leadshine dm542 at 48Volts. My conclusion is, after Reading stepper basics from the gecko stepper drivers company web, the higher the inductance, the higher the ps voltage, they even gave a formula, but for nema 23, and i didnt know how they deduced it. It was something like Vps=sqrt(32*phi) . The motors worked specially well, i guess due to the damn heat pressed pulleys that were at least the pitch, 2gt compatible. The mpcnc worked wonders.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yeah the voltage definitely has to be a lot higher for high-inductance steppers - I think I've seen that formula before... I knew that bigger CNCs always run at ridiculous voltages, and it turns out that's mainly because NEMA 23s inherently have a higher inductance due to the coils being physically larger. There's so much I didn't even touch on in this ridiculously long video, haha The press-fit pulleys are a giant PITA, I had to remove them off camera because building a suitable gear puller was a whole science of its own, with how close those pulleys frequently are to the motor casing... And don't get me started on the GT2 incompatibility!

[@poptartmcjelly7054]

i had a printer built with those low resolution 7.5 degree steppers and the thing almost shook itself to pieces. Those steppers hate microstepping.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yup, microstepping doesn't work _at all_ on them, you set them to 1/16th steps and they simply do fullsteps is what I learned from my printer

[@jamesblackwell5141]

The epson printers used 32-40 volt power supplies so i think those steppers were made to run at higher voltages.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

That's interesting, thanks!

[@abderrahmaneabdee6612]

You are the best 👍

[@AnonymousAnarchist2]

8:07 I remeber those catalogs, you call the company up speak to the represemitive and they would offer to email you the entire beast or just snail mail it. thousands of pages just like that some where even gloss print ot allowed anyone with an buisness tax id to be a supplier man that made running a small shop easy peasy back in the day; although it made being a hobbysit a pain in the butt

[@ChronicMechatronic]

We've sure come a long way since! I vaguely remember my mom placing orders over the phone still when I was like 5 years old... On top of being a pain I can't imagine what stuff must've cost before the proliferation of online sellers getting factory QC rejects and clones shipped in from China...

[@AnonymousAnarchist2]

​@ChronicMechatronic You know it was a price drop f9r a while then prices shot up when large distrubtors consolidated by mostly leasing through Amazon. Should settle out eventually these things always do but meanwhile 🫤. Also Really love chronic stepotest 9000, with a fully automated adjustment and linebreak. Your ready for a laser show with that guy. Im still giggling at it good job man.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

@AnonymousAnarchist2 yeah Amazon's not cheap these days - I mostly buy from Aliexpress, and even there it's getting more expensive.. Haha I was having real trouble with that green laser diode. I don't know whether it's in its final throes or what, but it was damn near impossible to control the intensity of it. Granted, I was running it at the lowest power it even lit up at, but I had to make a custom constant current source because I thought it was the driver at fault, just to find out it still flickered ☹️ Every time it was turned on it just sort of started out much brighter and then dimmed down after like 0.2 seconds or so. I ordered a bag of replacements but couldn't wait for them to arrive, so continued without - in many of those charts you can actually see the left-most dots being much brighter than the rest as a result...

[@sibalogh]

What about stepper motors in CD W/R units, aren't they small enough?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

They're the crappy low-res type; I think they only do like 20 steps per revolution. 99% sure microstepping doesn't work on them at all either

[@antonsorokin3881]

У вас подборка совсем разных двигателей. В струйных, матричных и лазерных принтерах, кассовых аппаратах применяются двигатели на 36, 64, 60 шагов и другие на очень малое количество шагов, что в 1998 году, что сейчас. Это сделано с целью удешевления. Вы могли купить в 90-х и двигатели на 200 шагов, и даже на 400. Такие двигатели применялись в некоторых дисководах и старых жестких дисках. Но были дороже. Если вы разберете современный струйный принтер, вы обнаружите мотор на 36 шагов, как и в аппарате 90-х годов, или вовсе коллекторный двигатель с энкодером. Сейчас двигатели на 200 шагов/оборот получили большее распространение благодаря FDM 3Д-принтерам.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yes yes I know - while I can only read the Google translated version of this comment it does sound like you're missing the point here - or maybe it's the language barrier. I do have many of those types of steppers, but the ones I tested in this video were all 200, or in one case 400, steps per revolution. Of course crappy motors these days are mostly as bad as crappy motors back in the 90s, the point here was to see whether the good steppers from back in the day are usable for modern CNC / 3D printing projects

[@raymundhofmann7661]

It's the cogging force.

[@xdevs23]

Since you were already doing this over multiple weeks, you could have gotten Trinamic drivers and used Marlin or Klipper so that you don't have to code as much.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I have some TMC2209 now - ordered them around the time I mentioned it in the video... As far as using Marlin/Klipper goes, I don't think there would've been any way of making it spit out that exact pattern of steps - at least not without spending more time trying to figure out how to do it than I spent writing that slapdash arduino sketch. Though the UART control of the TMCs would've prevented all the pain setting the motor current via the little trim potentiometer on the A4988... But I would've had to order the TMC drivers right when I started filming this video for them to arrive on time, and for that I should've made up my mind about what drivers to use in the first place a bit sooner 😅

[@xdevs23]

@@ChronicMechatronic I understand, that makes sense. As for Klipper, you can set the rotation distance using following formula: rotation_distance = * / . full_steps_per_rotation is 400 for 0.9° and 200 for 1.8°. microsteps can be 16 (or whatever you have configured for the steppers) and steps_per_mm can be 1. This would mean for every millimeter you tell Klipper to travel, it would move a microstep. So for 1.8°, it is 200 * 16 / 1 which equals 3200. That should make it possible for you to do microstep movements.Then you just need to send G-Codes and you're good to go. Still, very interesting and entertaining video!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

@@xdevs23Actually, now that you spell it out, it sounds pretty simple - I hadn't thought about just setting steps per mm to 1... 😂

[@xdevs23]

@ Oh well, sometimes the simplicity is hidden in plain sight. Happens to me all the time, too.

[@nalinux]

I'm not sure you can really measure with accuracy the current a motor will use just by measuring its resistance in Ohms.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I didn't - I directly measured the current going through the windings by putting the multimeter in series. The resistance is important mostly because inductance is proportional to it. The A4988 actively regulates the current, so you don't want ohms law to interfere. Whereas the high-resistance steppers (like nearly all unipolar ones I've ever come across) would be used in circumstances where you can't use complex drive circuitry for some reason and want ohms law to limit the current through the motor coils. The tradeoff is maximum RPM the motor can do - high resistance means high inductance which puts a limit on how fast an electromagnets can reverse polarity, consequently determining the maximum number of steps it can take per second...

[@nalinux]

@@ChronicMechatronic I wrote it because at the beginning of the video, you measure to see if a motor need 1.5 or 1.7 A. And since it's an inductance, and motor control is done by short pulses, of course it doesn't react like a plain resistor.

[@luizmiguelargentonperrella5166]

Olá sou brasileiro gostei do vídeo

[@zafindraberahonaJCA]

Btw I love "chronic burnathing"😅

[@toma.cnc1]

4:25 OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO, Do not remove the rotor from the stator on stepper motors, that will irrevocably ruin them and render them useless! Stepper motors are magnetized after they are fully assembled.

[@toma.cnc1]

You can freely open the back cover and change it to bi-polar, i have done that many, many times.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Who told you that? Stepper motors aren't magnetized at all, the neodymium magnet in the rotor is magnetized during _its_ production, yes, but after that they just get glued between the rotor laminations. Though there is a good reason not to disassemble stepper motors at all, which I only discovered during the video but didn't get around to mentioning. It's explained in some of the READMEs on my GitHub instead: github.com/ChronicMechatronic/Stepper-motor-benchmarking/blob/main/JAPAN%20SERVO%20KP39HM2-025/README.md

[@toma.cnc1]

@ Yeah, you should do some more research before replying. Vexta had some good videos on the subject.

[@QequalsMCdeltaT]

try drv8824, cheap old, badass and grandpa of tmc stepper drivers

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I don't know, they never looked very enticing to me... But I ended up getting two TMC2209, the UART control for microstepping and current seems like a life saver after the struggle with the potentiometer on the A4988 😅 To do torque tests on all these motors I'll need to have things significantly more automated, the way I did it here was a giant pain 😂

[@SheepyIsSleepy]

​​@@ChronicMechatronic I can attest that uart control over 2209 drivers is magical

[@egorkorostelev999]

8:31, that is really Assy motor you have 😁

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Lol!

[@romzesdemon]

дружище привет я думаю в твоих тестах слабым местом мог оказаться драйвер шагового мотора лучше бы ты его заменил на TB6600 он не дорогой и еще побеспокойся об экранировании проводов поскольку довольно часто именно пропуск шагов и нестабильная работа это помехи в проводке

[@victortitov1740]

i'm 90% sure this microstep bunching has more to do with A4988 being garbage, than motors being bad..

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Yes, that seems to be the consensus here - turns out there's something called current decay mode which is selected via a resistor on the step stick board - it might have something to do with how the motors operate at low currents.. I haven't really dug into the datasheet yet to try and understand it

[@victortitov1740]

@@ChronicMechatronic i've once looked at how magnetic flux behaves in the poles of a stepper, i have a comparison between trinamic and allegro there. kzbin.info/www/bejne/hoq2ao2ah7WXgdksi=rn7zmtVUYYwONfrr&t=1964 It would have been easier to just measure currents in the coils for this driver accuracy purposes, but the goal of that video was different.

[@victortitov1740]

@@ChronicMechatronic i haven't played with that decay mode either, it might indeed make things better. Or worse =)

[@mustafizsiam1506]

How about you make a cnc machine capable of milling steel?!

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Already in the very early stages of thinking about it! 🤗 Will be a CNC capable Bridgeport style mini mill though, since I don't really like the CNC router gantry type machines :)

[@michaelmayerhofer322]

What is the idea behind the annoying elevator music in the background?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Getting this exact comment was the only goal.

[@luizmiguelargentonperrella5166]

Quero mais vídeos traduzidos

[@ChronicMechatronic]

KZbin's auto-dubbing feature should theoretically be available; maybe it just takes a few days to process

[@bblz9171]

electrical engineering student?

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Qualifies too!

[@human_shaped]

Characterising your re-wired motors seems like the height of pointlessness.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Please elaborate how you think it was pointless after I got an actually dependable current rating out of it and we now all know that rewiring unipolar stepper motors does not necessarily make them any more usable than they were before. And of the 14 motors I tested only those 2 were rewired, so it's not like I put a huge bunch of data out there that's useless unless someone did the exact same mod on the same models of stepper I have.

[@human_shaped]

@@ChronicMechatronic Yes, most of the info was good. Maybe I wasn't clear; I just said characterising the two re-wired motors was pointless. You seem to be talking like I said it was all useless, which it wasn't. Most of it was very interesting.

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Okay, maybe I overreacted a bit based on the wording, but why was it pointless? I need at least a current rating if I ever want to use those rewired motors for something?

[@zero_deux1631]

Attend, tu est français ?? Ton accent na pas dutout l'air français 😂

[@tonyhill8300]

Gay

[@ChronicMechatronic]

As you please.

[@ONLYyourmemes]

Bro please please please make a Detal 3D printer programing tutorial for Beginners 🙏🙏😭

[@ChronicMechatronic]

I'm absolutely no good at programming and barely get my generic bedslinger tuned enough to produce decent results 🥲

[@jvegazorro]

👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

[@mdski95]

Pausing at 29:30 to go fetch some good-ass watah made me refrain from simply repeating the positive sentiment in the comments-which I share, naturally-as the still frame allowed me to notice that cardboard-augmented (if not entirely cardboard?) furniture. Brethren in Effective Hoarding, we are. 🫡 One of my creative life mottos: "Hmm, dang it... should I trash [[random object or normies' waste]]? Kinda makes a good piece of stock. I'm 42% sure I can fit it somewhere."

[@ChronicMechatronic]

Haha yeah, entirely cardboard shelving, held together by hot glue and tape 😅 And _many_ years old at that! I've thrown away stuff in the past, just to find a great use for it six months later and thought "damn, why did I ever throw that out!" Nope, those incidents totally didn't turn me into even worse of a hoarder! *guiltily looks at box of rusty machine screws and broken drill bits that might still come in handy if I need some small round stock