Hey guys I was wondering if anyone has any experience with the new Allegro 5984 drivers. I am wondering if they are better than the TI 8825. I am about to purchase an Azteeg X5 with the 5984 drivers.
And some updated pics on my printer progress. Still in the middle of cleaning up the wiring. The control box layout has been modelled in SW and I am currently machining the enclosure and internal panels.
On paper, the 5984s are vastly better than the 8825. Any adaptive decay algorithm is preferable to the garbage decay scheme in the 8825. I haven’t tried the 5984s yet though.
I have run ti8825 drivers for years. I recently switched to Panucatt sd5984 and love them on my HercuLien. I have noticed a marked improvement in surface finish going to the SD5984. The TI8825 have some notable issues with my motor selection at 24V. Not unusable, but I would get odd random artifacts that completely disappeared with the new drivers. One thing to note is the SD5984 are lower current, and run much hotter than the TI driver.
With how well fabricated your printer seem to be, I would put equal design time into matching stepper drivers and motors to your design. @Ryan_Carlyle has a great tool for this, and I wish I understood about it earlier. It would have saved me a bunch of hassle chasing down what I thought was mechanical issues… But which was likely tied to the stepper driver / motor combination.
Even more than the 5984 I like the SD6128, but those have been out of stock for a while, apparently due to supply issue by Sanyo who makes the chip.
@Kyle1 also if you want I have the X5 mini v3 modeled is SW if you want to use it for your electrical enclosure model.
Nevermind, I see you already have it in there 
Is that two motors on the rear screw?
I’m seeing a lot of reduction pulley action here, care to share your thinking on the drivetrain design?
@Ryan_Carlyle Yes that is 2 motors on the rear screw. I originally had the bed cantilevered and one motor on the rear screw was adequate, but I could tell it was straining. I then added the second motor. After some test prints I noticed that the bed had some vibration. This due to the force on the linear V bearings supporting the bed. The shaft of the V bearing was under too much load. To fix this I added the two front ball screws and support arm underneath the bed. This fixed any vibration issues and now the bed is very solid. I am going to remove one of the motors from the rear screw, just have not done it yet.
@Eclsnowman I really appreciate you taking the time to model up the X5. I could not find a model anywhere and finally came across your github.
Are you planning to run external drivers to handle the three z steppers? I think three motors will be too much for a single driver to handle running them wired parallel. Then again you have a mighty pulley reduction on there, and quality ball screws should help since they are low friction elements.
@Eclsnowman If they’re wired in series, on 24v, with very low-inductance motors, it will be ok. Just slow. I’ve seen people do that with triple-screw printers before. Not ideal though.
Yes I am using the Protoneer arduino driver board with step dir en signals jumpered to all drives on the board. So far in testing it works great. I’m really excited about the new Mechaduino boards and plan to integrate those for lossless synchronized motion on the z motors.
This is impressive! How big will be your build space then?
@Matthias_Stegert1 Build volume is around 17"in. cube.
This project is amazing, I’m so jealous. My Diy printer looks like a bird’s nest of wires, yours is catalog worthy. Excellent and very well thought out work!
