@John_Bump what you’re describing has been in use for high-power LEDs for a while - all those star-type or square PCBs with a single 3W LED on top are of that kind. You can then glue (thermal adhesive) the bare aluminum base to whatever heatsink you’d need - works pretty well for my bike light, which is 5 white CREE XP-G (~ 3W ea.), each on a 1cm² aluminum PCB glued into an aluminum case.
That’s the area of IC design I work in, @Thomas_Sanladerer . Let me tell you what, reworking a board with 40 5W LED’s on it because a couple are blown, is a pain in the neck.
Hi Thomas,
I recently purchased a DRV8825 driver to use with one of my stepper motors. The stepper motor has a rating of 1.68A/phase. What I would like to know is how did you put the heatsink onto this driver without it being loose? (I saw your picture above). And what did you use? Is it just normal aluminium?
@Evert_Frederick_Trol the smaller heatsinks are aluminum ones from a kit for GPUs by Arctic (formerly Arctic Cooling), glued on with Arctic Silver thermal adhesive.
The bigger one fitting two drivers is a generic one i picked up for a Euro a while ago, glued on just the same.
However, motors rated for 1.68A should not require a heatsink on their driver since the DRV8825 generally runs very cool.
Wow, this post was from a year ago. Since then they’ve modified the design so that it has the proper resistors on the FAULT pin, and the ones I’ve seen were absolutely cool and quiet.
@Thomas_Sanladerer Thanks Thomas. On the Pololu website it states that it can deliver up to approximately 1.5A per phase without a heat sink…so you reckon 1.68A wouldn’t be a problem even if I run it over long periods of time?
@ThantiK it seem I was pretty much the only one who was ever bothered by the noise - even when I heard it on someone’s Youtube video, the uploader said he barely notices it.
@Evert_Frederick_Trol the current you run your motors at will depend on how hot they get anyways - and they will also run just fine if they only get 1.5A.
That current should be doable without a heatsink, maybe with a fan that slightly blows over your electronics (and its mosfets) at most.
@Thomas_Sanladerer Ok thanks. Will test it out.
@Thomas_Sanladerer I just got a smoothie MKS board and it think it comes with the same stepper motor. The noise is driving me crazy! Can’t figure how to fix it