Hi all, a quick question before making the final decision on stepper drivers for

General CNC CNC Routers
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Hi all, a quick question before making the final decision on stepper drivers for our local FabLab (http://www.avilab.fr) C-Beam build which we plan to make move with OpenBuilds High Torque Series NEMA23 or similar motors (3A+): Wantai DQ542MA or Chuanwei CW5045 ? Or any other best suited/higher quality/best performing for these motors ? (electronics will be arduino+cnc shield)

Another one, I think I’ve red somewhere that they where digital drivers but tech specs make me doubtful :confused: Could someone clarify this for me please ?

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Check out TinyG and Chilipeppr for the most active open source CNC development community. As far as I am concerned there is no better choice as this project seems to have major legs. Arduino is using the SPJS server for their next IDE but Chilipeppr is so easy to fork and make your own interfaces and widgets that there is no limit to what you can control. It interfaces with Arduino and a rPi3 board can run everything so you can control it from anywhere, with video. IMO this is the ultimate motion controller platform for all Fab Lab machines because if converges 3d, laser, milling, soldering, pick and place…

I don’t work for any of them but we build CNC machines and this is now the core of our approach.

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@Steve_Anken ChiliPeppr FTW ! That’s for sure :slight_smile: For the electronics, I stepped away from TinyG boards because of embedded drivers (less modularity and these things happen to burn it seems) and because of licence… But they were indeed my first choice. Now that we’re going with external drivers and that it seems we don’t need an additional board, TinyG2 may be re-evaluated, running on an Arduino Due…But I learned to love the Smoothie side of things and the great people around it… For now we will make the first build with RPi+Uno/Alamode(+CNC Shield)+Ext drivers+ChiliPeppr

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Have not had one burn yet and I have used both internal and external at the same time running duel 34s for y and 23s for x and z. So far so good.using Geckos, Leadshine and a servo driver. We have some other drivers that are really cheap and claim 256 micro steps. The servos are really fun with encoders and DSP logic built in and they take step and dir. Lot of options but TinyG is easy and stable for us right now.
Yeah, it’s chilipeppr and SPJS that makes it all work for us. I’m avoiding diving into G2 and have not tried Smoothie but I like how fast Chilipeppr is evolving.

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@Steve_Anken actually, I meant that I could make them burn ! :wink: And having the drivers soldered on the board makes me “nervous”.
On a side note, the best setup I’ve seen so far is Panucatt’s Gradus M1, with 3 driver connection options: polulu style, bigfoot and external.

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Thanks for the info. I’d like a Tinyg without the drivers as a drop in replacement for some older systems. The servos with built in encoders and DSP logic can take step and dir and even feed data out by USB. The big one for me is John’s SPJS and Chilipeppr’s development environment. The G2 might be next for us but it’s not ready for end users who are new to CNC. This is a moving target as people add more functionality but we have to kinda freeze it each time we make a machine. It’s not easy to get Mach3 users to see what Chilipeppr can do for them until they see it so I hacked together a portable machine and we are doing demos for various groups in SoCal. Fun times. :slight_smile: