I’ve preordered a Carve-X 1000x1000mm with Nema 23 stepper motors which are rated at 2.8A and 200 steps per rotation. I have a smoothie 5 x and will have to use external stepper drivers. I have a couple questions about choosing drivers and setting them up.
Is it possible to use external drivers as well as doubling the drivers? I’m new at this, but I’m guessing that I could connect two external drivers in parallel to the M2breakout pins(for my y-axis) or would it be better to enslave one of the additional outputs such as M4 or M5?
Also trying to choose my external stepper drivers and I’m noticing that some of them do not have a setting for steps per revolution. Does this apply to me or is this set in the smoothie?
I’m really liking the price on the 1 axis TB6560 3A Driver Boards. Will it work with the smoothie? It is much cheaper than the other drivers I’ve looked at. Will I regret cheaping out on these?
4.I plan to set my smoothie up to run via the network port, so I need to figure out the best way to power the board since I will not be using the usb port. VBB input with a 5v voltage regulator or is there a better way?
I’ve tested external stepper drivers in our hackerspace (video) so i can answer some of your questions:
Yep, no problem, just connect both step connectors of the drivers to the right pin on the smoothieboard.
You choose a Microstepping setting on the driver AND you set the steps per mm in your smoothie config file to get the correct number of steps for a certain distance.
Should be possible (no guaranty because i use DQ860MA drivers)
As far as i know, you can connect a 5V power supply to the same connector. 2 pins are for VBB, the other two are for logic power supply. If you do that , you don’t need the regulator.
Fantastic. Thank you for the confirmation. I still have about 5 weeks until the x-carve ships, so I have plenty of time to play around with my smoothie. I’m loving how easy it is to configure the smoothie, and not having to recompile is awesome when changing settings. The documentaion is great as well.
I got the network set up and for now, I have my smoothie powered through the usb port with a cell phone charger. I also have it setup over my wireless network with a Netgear WNCE2001.
Next up is to figure out how to get the hostname to work on my network and I also need to solder on my headers for external stepper drivers.
Next up is to figure out how to get the hostname to work on my network
That’s a point i also need to take a look at. I configured the hostname, but for some reason it didn’t work.
Let me know if you find out whats the problem!
I was never able to get my smoothie to resolve on the network automatically, however I did find a work around by setting a static ip address on my smoothie and editing my hosts file on my local computer to resolve.
Here are my network settings on my smoothieboard:
# network settings
network.enable true # enable the ethernet network services
network.webserver.enable true # enable the webserver
network.telnet.enable true # enable the telnet server
network.plan9.enable true # enable the plan9 network filesystem
#network.ip_address auto # use dhcp to get ip address
network.hostname smoothie1 # optionally set this hostname for dhcp
# uncomment the 3 below to manually setup ip address
network.ip_address 192.168.0.106 # the IP address
network.ip_mask 255.255.255.0 # the ip mask
network.ip_gateway 192.168.0.1 # the gateway address
#network.mac_override xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx # override the mac address, only do this if you have a conflict
Then I located my hosts file on my local computer and added an entry to point “smoothie1” towards my smoothie IP. I found my host file at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts I did have to change the permissions to allow me to save the updated file and then I rebooted my pc. This will have to be done on each computer you want to access your smoothie via hostname.
# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
