December 11, 2020
3D Printing - Stepper Drivers
These are a big deal.
A printer with low end drivers will be loud and prints will lack detail.
So what does my Ender 3D Pro have?
The 4. series boards I am reading about use a TMC2225 driver, which is probably a Trinamic driver.
We will have to see what my machine has when it arrives.
Back in the day, the Ender 3 used a A4988 driver.
The following Hackaday article discusses replacing those with Trinamic TMC2208 drivers.
The machine also used an 8 bit AVR controller rather than a 32 bit ARM STM32F103.
Board upgrade
It seems that boards are available from Creality for all the Ender 3 printers, so it is likely
that my new printer will have the quiet drivers and ARM chip, but we will see.
The board is available on Amazon for $40 and people report that you just plug it in,
with a possible need for a firmware upgrade.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org