Ah, come on… All you need is a die and you can just put some on… 
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That was the special bolt to show you won, that was the one billionth bolt!!! You get a free replacement and a sticker!
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Dan, what do you think your first project will be with the fancy steppers?
That’s a good question, I would like to rebuild my upholstery cutter so that I could make the size a little more specific to standard rolls of upholstery. I’m not for sure that that doesn’t just look like a new lowrider table though.
I would also love to make a CNC lathe and also play around with injection molding.
I like that Adam Savage describes himself as a skills collector. I think the biggest deficiency in my skills right now is understanding how to program steppers for a specific job. That’s why my original post was asking about what system should I concentrate on learning.
It seems like Arduino would be a good idea for a basic steppers control system. I own an old Uno from a couple years back. I know Mach 3 or Linux CNC or a handful of others exist for lathes but I don’t know anything about them.
I am far from an experienced voice in this subject. For me I think it depends more on the use as to what would be the best tool to learn. Steppers are kinda dumb/simple. You just tell them how many steps to take and how fast to do it. So I would base the more major part of the project. If I was making a belt cutter I would use arduino so I could easily tie in some buttons or other simple things. Ex, move 300 steps, wait for button push reverse 300 steps. If you are making a motion system that does something other than printing it think GRBL might be the easiest system to work on. Anything more complicated is above my paygrade. For my plasma cutter with “THC” I think I am going to try the linux cnc route and learn from the masters.
I don’t think anyone learning how to move a stepper from an arduino would be a waste. It is really much less work than it looks like. Just starting from blink, and then doing your own work to toggle a pin, and manage the enable and dir pins is pretty fun. You will be down near the iron, bit banging and learning a bunch. Add in a library to give you a few more features, like max speed and acceleration and then you will find more useful libraries and not worry about adding them.
LinuxCNC or Mach3 is the completely different end of the spectrum. It would be learning a system, their way, and trying to find ways to do what you want. But the benefit here is that you can send it any number of gcodes and it will know exactly what to do with them.
I built a two axis camera slider from a project @dkj4linux made and that was written for the esp32 (sort of an arduino) and controlled two steppers and had a tiny web interface. I did that because there wasn’t a regular XY relationship to those two steppers and the interface was more important to me than the stepper motion (the steppers were just moving in one line).
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So I keep staring at these servo/steppers and thinking these need to be used for something. I just can 't find any info on them datasheet wise.
Can I use the SKR Pro control board with larger drivers like the standalone enclosure type? I am assuming the on board drivers are not powerful enough but that is not based on anything other than a hunch.
The Marlin/V1 system is all i’ve ever used and I don’t know how well it scales up. When I look at larger CNC systems, I always see Mach 3/4 and VFDs and start getting real nervous.
I keep looking at AVID’s website and muttering about how much I could save and how much I could learn if I just built it myself.
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I also see that there are 5160 drivers that might be able to be added to the SKR board. I just don’t know how to find how much power my steppers need.
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For unknown steppers, heat is a good indicator of current handling. Start low and increase until they get warm. Off the top of my head, 20C over ambient is a good max when being held at full current. If they are used intermittently, you can go even higher. You can get pretty large drivers that plug into the SKR, or you can get standalone drivers, that pug into the skr (or any board) and use an external power supply, they actually are not very expensive.
And, you don’t typically need full power you just need enough power.
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Can the SKR board with Marlin utilize servo feedback? I know I don’t need it but I already have the servos.
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I don’t think so. The only closed loop stuff I have seen is stand alone.
Not 100% on this though.
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I’ve done all sorts of high speed packaging, pharmaceutical, and plastics machines. Even specialized in winders with automatic roll changeover at speeds up to 1200 fpm. So, if you want to bounce around some ideas around…
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I’ve done pouching machines for various vendors, such as those little mayonnaise packets etc. They used simple steppers to pull the material between two rubber wheels. The two wheels were linked be gears. One side was on a pivot with pneumatic cylinder and pressure regulator to control grip of the wheels. The downside was slippage of any sort can really throw off the cut length of the product, ie length of the cut belt. You need to control tension of infeed material. We found a dancer on a loop between material spool and machine helped with a weighted canvas strap resting on the spool was the cheapest and easiest tension control solution.
Probably just bored you to tears, but I love doing r&d like that…
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Nope, sounds like a directors cut of “how it’s made”…and I have watched sooo many of those episodes. I am pretty sure several professors at SDSU showed us clips as well. that kind of stuff is exactly my kind of interesting.
Following up on an old thread. Ryan, have you seen this video with the GT2 belt winder? A little extra automation encounter should get you pretty close if you haven’t already gotten your own system.
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Oh, man that gives me some ideas! Thank you so much!
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