Does anyone has setup 2 separate z motors not in slave mode? Did a bit research and duet wifi appear to be the only controller (reprap firmware) capable of doing this.
i think you can do the same with a smoothieboard.
It works with any driver, the duet just has two connectors to connect two motors in series. You can also connect two motors in parralel but then they won’t run the exact same currents due to slight variations of the motors but usually it’s not a problem.
In the past I had my z-motors parralel on the RUMBA, now I have them in series on the Duet WiFi, I never had any issues with these setups.
Not sure what you mean by slave mode.
On the smoothieboard you can use 2 stepper drivers to drive the same axis. I drive the y-axis on my cnc mill with 2 stepper motors using a smoothieboard. You just connect the step/dir pins on the board. Check the smoothie wiki for more info.
Keep in mind that the standard homing cycle only supports homing to 1 endstop per axis. (I’m hoping this will be implemented in the future as it’s not uncommon to have 2 motors driving the y-axis on a gantry mill.)
If your motors lose a step or if they are turned while the printer is off that axis will be “out of sync”.
Afaik you could solve this with a trigger, haven’t tried it yet though.
LinuxCNC/MachineKit is able to handle this though. Having 2 motors on the same axis homing to it’s own endstop.
Azteeg X3 and it X3 Pro version di this. I have 2 Z motors connected to teo different drivers on the board, which is configured to slave the second driver to the first on in the marlin firmware
In Marlin you can configure two indipendend motors for the z axis and drive them both with their own endstop.
thx I have 2 z towers each with its own x carriage and 1 moving y bed. at the moment I’m undecided whether I should use:
a) 1 z motor to drive the two towers
b) 2 z motors run in slave mode
c) 2 z motors completely independent