Testing a Stepper Motor from a live image

Most of the more "industrial" devices have a jumper or setting to invert the enable input to allow it to be used either way, but the default is usually such that if nothing is connected they are enabled.

Well now I know it is a mistake you do only once. So basically you could control a Stepper driver with three wires.

One on minus
One on dir
One on pulse.

What is the chance of electromagnetic interference in a metal enclosure?

So basically the only use of the enable function it for a soft emergency stop, but you will loose you position,

Is there any real use for it?

The motors are up an running.

Question what is better for max acceleration full step or micro-stepping?

Also I find the motors same size from same manufacturer differ quite a lot in how much acceleration they can handle without stalling. Is that normal?

The minimum is only two, pulse and dir. An enable/disable signal is optional. (This is only true for a step motor, an enable signal should not optional for a servo, even if it is controlled by step/dir signals.)

The only use I've made for a stepper disable is to allow manual depth adjustment on the Z of a router. Pause the machine, disable the Z motor, manually turn the Z screw a little to adjust the depth, re-enable and continue carving. Otherwise no, I have not found any good use for it.

Generally full stepping will give the greatest torque and highest speeds (so long as there are no resonance issues causing stalling.)

Also, the smaller the micro-step the less accurate the holding position will be. Realistically you can't count on a stepper motor to be held in position closer than to within about 1/4 of a full step when micro-stepping. Especially if there is any sort of load pushing or pulling on it.

The real advantage of fine micro-stepping is the reduction or removal of cogging and resonance effects of the individual steps on the movement. The resulting movement with be smooth(er) and quiet(er) and less likely to have a resonance induced stall.

Increasing your micro stepping beyond about 1/8 of a full step will do nothing to increase the machines real resolution or positional accuracy.

I think the argument about full steps vs microsteps giving better accuracy is yesterdays technology. You don't know for sure if the driver is passing the full microsteps through. Most today use step morphing I'm sure. I've never had any trouble with 25 x microstepping (5000 steps/rev) on low end chinese drives or the super high end Lam Technologies drives. In fact, Lam's manual for its drives gives examples recommending 1/128 x microstepping for smoother operation. But you need to be aware of the maximum frequency step pulses that can be achived with a given motion model (eg Linuxcnc.) The Mesa cards can operate stepgens at 10 Mhz but thats way higher than what can be achieved in a Linuxcnc world due to the steplen and other parameters we set. But yes, if you loose power, expect to revert to the nearest full step.

Hey Rod,
What is your go-to microstepping factor using Chinese drives and a Mesa card? I have been using 8x microstepping, never considered changing it but with the strange issues I have on this machine, i'm willing to try anything. I have a Mesa 7i96 board and KL-5056e drives.

Thanks!

I've always used 25x microstepping (5000 pulses/rev) even with My Longs Motor DM542a drivers.
I did do quite a bit of experimenting to see how fast I could go but there is a limit before Linuxcnc complains.

LinuxCNC will not complain unless your scaling generates
step rates that violate your step-length and step-space timings