Looking to incorporate linear rails into the lowrider basic design. I want to put the most powerful steppers I can using the boards/drivers/firmware available here. I’d like to buy directly from v1 because I want to support them as much as possible. Does anyone know that max size these boards and drivers will handle?
The restriction isn’t size, it’s current. Maybe to an extent voltage, most of these boards don’t like anything over 24V. These boards by themselves are good for 4-wire configurations up to about 2A current. If you want 6 wire interfaces, or 36V or 48V power, then you’ll need to use external drivers.
Really though if you want to go through all that for more power, I think that there are other designs out there that might fit better. As is, the LowRider is an inexpensive option for a large cutting area, and for that, it’s a good design. There are some remixes of parts out there for NEMA 23 motors, but how far until what you’re building really isn’t the same machine anymore?
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No you’re 100% correct. It won’t be much of the same machine. I haven’t found a reasonably priced cnc that will cut a 4x4 sheet of material for nearly the price I can do if I make one based on this design. Even with the nominal added cost of some linear rails. If you have any suggestions for diy designs that would fit my application I’d love to take a look! I’m familiar with 3d printing so I really liked the cnc design that was so similar to running my printers. I have compiled marlin for my printers but am not familiar enough with it to try to compile it for this application so I figured using the precompiled firmware would be a huge plus to getting this thing working. I was actually looking at the nema 23 but wasn’t sure if the skr board could handle it. If I’m correct they’re 2 amps so they should be able to run directly from any of these boards correct? Is there any advantage of one board over the others?
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The usual advice for this kind of situation is to build it according to the original design first, and then consider modifications.
If you boost cutting speed faster and faster, or if you cut hard materials, you might find that the deflection becomes unacceptable before the motors skip steps, even with NEMA 17. And if you keep going faster, only then do you skip steps. In that situation, upgrading the motors to NEMA 23 would provide zero benefit and be purely downside. Even if everything is correct with your design and the motor drivers, it’s very hard to rule out the nonstandard components if you encounter strange behavior.
Linear rails might also have uncertain benefit, and once your are off the beaten path, you don’t get nearly as much benefit from others who have made every possible mistake with the standard design and know the remedies. These effects are multiplied if this is your first machine and you have somewhat less intuition about how things are supposed to work under standard conditions.
So to summarize, by building the standard configuration first and then modifying after that
- If you encounter difficulties with the first build, the community will be in a position to help
- The operation of the machine will be informative as to which modifications will help and by how much
- Your modifications are made to a working baseline, so problems are much easier to narrow down
I don’t want to discourage modifications, but there are plenty of risks for improving the wrong thing.
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Solid advice. Thank you!
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