AXYZ retrofit - Stepper driver settings

I found a few more details of these stepper motors online. 

1.8° STEP MOTOR
MODEL: H31NRHT - LNF - N8-00
Is: 5.4 A
BIPOLAR PARALLEL
Vs: 35 V
Po: 82 W
1500 RPM   

 

Don't worry about sticking to 35 volts per the sticker. That's irrellevant. A good stepper will take up 90 volts so 60-72 volts would be perfect for that motor. You can see that it can handle change in temperature of 90 deg C from a max 40 deg C Ambient temperature. I usually work on 35 deg Ambient. So it is safe to operate up to 130 deg C which says its a quality motor. People needlessly worry that their motors get hot! Hot will sizzle flesh!

Also what's not understood that for given design parameters, the motor may not need the maximum amperage it is rated for. I analyse stepper performance via some engineering design tools. For example a Sanyo danki 2 amp motor, I am evaluating requires:
1.0 amps RMS, 38 volt power, and just 4 degrees C heat increase. I have run these motors at around 90 volts using 64 volt AC LAM DS1073.

Note the 4.2 amp DM542A from Longs Motor is different (superior) to the DM542. 4.2 amps @ 48 volts would probably be all you need.

And as Tommy says, Lams are the best drivers out there. Here is some high speed action I filmed a while ago. 2amp Sanyo Denki on the X axis accellerating at 0.5 G (5 m/s/s) I did run them at 0.8 G  when testing.
 

Trouble is if you are in the US, they are not readily available unless you buy from Tommy's source.

Many thanks to everyone who has offered some advice. I found a single stepperonline DM860T stepper driver on marketplace to test with and I now have the x-axis wired to my 7i96 for and moving, more-or-less as expected. I have the driver and Mesa card wired for differential inputs (dir +/- and step +/-). For settings, I'm simply using 5000/5000/10000/10000.

 

For what it is worth, the timing page in the stepperonline manual lists:

• dir must be ahead of pul by 5000ns
• pulse with not less than 2500ns
• low level width not less than 2500ns
  
  
  Two quirks I've noticed:
  1. The max limit for direction hold/setup in the 'Test/Tune Axis' option is 10000, rather than the recommended 20000.
  2. Occasionally, when using 'run' on the 'Test/Tune Axis' panel, for a back and forth test of 2", the movement at the end of travel oscillates around the endpoints. It isn't consistent, it will oscillate for a little bit and then stop oscillating and then start up again. I will try and post a video of this shortly. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Occasionally, when using 'run' on the 'Test/Tune Axis' panel, for a back and forth test of 2", the movement at the end of travel oscillates around the endpoints. It isn't consistent, it will oscillate for a little bit and then stop oscillating and then start up again. I will try and post a video of this shortly. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

This typically means that the P term is set too high in the local PID control loop.
For local control loops, P should be set to 1/(servo period in seconds), That is,
1000 for a 1 ms servo thread period or 500 for a 2 ms servo thread period.

The physical meaning of this P term setting is that any detected position errors
are corrected by the next servo thread invocation.

A few questions:
1) Does pid tuning apply to open-loop stepper control (ie no encoders)? Where is it getting the error/difference signal from if I don’t have encoders or any other sensors?
2) why do these oscillations only occur periodically?

A few questions:
1) Does pid tuning apply to open-loop stepper control (ie no encoders)? Where is it getting the error/difference signal from if I don’t have encoders or any other sensors?

 Yes. the feedback is from the stepgen position counter

2) why do these oscillations only occur periodically?

No idea, might actually be a bug in the tuning routine, so I would check motion with a real LinuxCNC setup.

Thanks for the insight. I'll do some testing outside of pncconf once I get all the stepper drivers installed.