Anyone have experience running dual Y motors off of a RAMPS 1.4?
Running A4988’s, set Marlin up, and readjusted trimpot, but the motor only jumps once on first command, locks, and doesn’t move again. The other Y stepper is working flawless.
I used to run a pair of motors for the y-axis from a single driver, but switched to dual drivers for extra torque.
Are your motors identical and are they wires up parallel or in series?
Z axis on a I3 runs 2 on the same controller.
If they are in parallel this can happen. I would suggest wiring them in series.
Reducing the current, because too much current can cause the motor saturated and stalled. Therefore, it means you had reached the maximun torque of the motor.
Thank you all for the responses:
+Thomas Sanladerer your second comment is what I am after. I do not have intention of physically running the motors off of the same voltage or current. I have 5 stepper drivers on my Ramps, E1 through program should smoothly drive DIR STP etc. to a second y motor. If you did this successfully, do you recall the program changes?
+Peter L you are correct sir, I am currently running two z motors. The board 33 or 34 are designed to handle dual Z and dual E(s). I want to use E1 to send y.
+Wayne Friedt I want to avoid running in parallel or series but off a dedicated A4988.
@Narit_B I thought this may be the issue at first but both stepper sticks are tuned identically. I was previously using this E1 to drive a second extruder, without issues.
My guess for now is it must be a code error. Time to start from scratch again.
@Brandon_Satterfield running them in series should at least work, even if it doesn’t give you the full torque.
Marlin has a feature in its config where you can directly declare the second extruder channel as a second Y driver.
When i set up the second driver, that functionality wasn’t there yet, so i made a daughterboard that shares all pins except the motor output with the on-board driver.
@Thomas_Sanladerer that’s a great solution, creating a slave board. I found my issue. One single “!” in the code I had missed all day yesterday. I guess I was getting tired.
For the application I require both motors to have full speed and available torque so I was stuck taking this route. They (the two y’s) act great together now.
Next step is dual Y endstops, to ensure the gantry is always true.