so i broke down and on black friday bought a kit that is on presale. Folgertech has released 10 kits. dont know how many has sold but 699 is what they are selling for. i got mine with 20% off on black friday. supposed to ship jan 5th
Looks like it could be decent for the money.
If they suppressed the spindle interference so GRBL runs OK it is worth it. That looks like hundreds of dollars of aggravation to me alone. Really all you have to do is put caps across the motor. But it takes folks a long time to figure that out on their own. heh
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Got a Fogler delta printer. The kit was missing a motor, but got a replacement without any questions. they got good and friendly support. Printer works better then expected given that i am to lazy to tune it. Prints are good enough for my mechanical prototyping.
well i have to say i have been a mod on the folgertech facebook page at the pure chance my nephew bought a 2020 i3 and he was having trouble. i started the folgertech reddit group since honestly there wasnt much support out there for thembut the reprap post.
i have been bugging john about building a kit for ages and he said he was working on it. needless to say he shot me a message and gave me the link saying it was open for presale and he set one to the side with my name on it. I had been going back and forth of buying the openbuilds mini mill or the smaller cnc but i kept removing them from my cart and that day i just about pulled the trigger before john sent me the link.
anyway good info about the noise on the spindle. i wouldnt have thought about that.
anyway he is using nema17’s on the z 2 on the y and a 23 on the x. drivers are going to be tb6600 4am and running at 24v.
think the first things i will upgrade will be the motors to all nema 23’s and then look at ball screws.
@Phillip_Ramirez I have my most powerful motor on my Z axis. Lifting against gravity is a bit taxing. I run my TB6600s at 32V. I was running some TB6560s at 24V, then 28V. Believe it or not at the top end a few more volts makes a big difference in performance. More than I ever would have imagined.
Which TB6600 drives do you have? Adjusting the current on mine was pretty critical in achieving the best running possible out of them. Initially I was running too much current. That made the motors really jerky. Dropping the current down to what my motors needed smoothed things out considerably. Plus they run much cooler now too.
To adjust the current I disconnected one of the motor wires to the drive and put an ammeter in series, then powered up, and set the holding current with an adjustment pot on board. Drives with a pot for adjustment are the best. Because you can dial those right in. You have to jog slowly to get a maximum current reading on your meter before you start adjusting. So just jog in tiny increments watching the ammeter. You’ll see it go up and down as you stop in various spots. Adjust when you’re at a high spot.
@Paul_Frederick honestly only think John has given was 4a tb6600. So not sure which ones they actually are. I have seen videos of his prototype running and it runs well. But hard to tell if I’m not there. If anything this should he a good base for me to improve upon. I’ll know more when it ships
@Phillip_Ramirez like I tried to explain in my previous comment current alone is not a power value. Watts is power. Watts is volts times amps too. A TB6600 can only output 40 Watts of power total max with an infinite ideal heatsink (read impossible). So at 24V it can supply 1.67 amps in fantasy land. More realistically you should expect something south of that. I would say from 14-20 Watts is not unreasonable. That nets you a max current of 0.83 amps at 24V But what a PWM stepper drive IC does is play with voltages to achieve the highest current flow that it can. That’s its reason to be. As far as the cheap stepper drives go TB6600s are pretty decent. All of the drives I’ve seen built with them suffer from a pretty low input voltage rating though. Why that is critical is due to inductive reluctance in motor coils and reduced dwell time at higher step rates. Then current drops off anyways.