Smooth quiet NEMA17 Steppers w/ 16 Tooth pulley

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  • April 15, 2015 at 10:39 am #7630
    rs274
    Member

    First of all, your board is awesome. Really great work.

    I’m wondering if anyone has managed to find the perfect settings to get NEMA17 steppers to run smooth and quite at any feedrate.

    Higher feedrates (F5000)are much smoother and quieter than lower feedrates(F500). It seems the Jerk settings are crucial. I’ve been playing around with all sorts of different ones but still can’t get a low feedrate to move like a high feedrate.

    Any tips? TIA
    Geoff

    April 15, 2015 at 11:40 pm #7634
    cmcgrath5035
    Moderator

    I don’t think there is such a setting. Steppers are neither smooth, nor quiet. Some factors such as belt tension will change the tone of the noise a bit. At certain velocities (stepper rate) you may excite natural harmonics in your machine that amplify the effect.
    Sure, higher speed sounds different.Smoother is just a perception.
    Jerk settings modify the aggressiveness of the acceleration and deceleration curves.

    Ultimately feed rates are determined by what your machine is doing – milling, drawing , lasing, etc. and by the materials being worked (plastic, work, metal, etc.

    April 21, 2015 at 8:40 pm #7645
    rs274
    Member

    >>Steppers are neither smooth, nor quiet.

    I don’t want to get bogged down in semantics but I beg to differ. I have many CNC machines and the steppers are all smooth and quiet thru their operating feedrates.

    Most have ballscrews so the shaft RPMs at lower feedrates are matching that of the higher feedrates on the pulley/belt system.

    Still my 3D printer uses a pulley/belt mechanism and it is fairly smooth and quiet so we’ll see.

    This is my first build with the tinyg so I’m not familiar with the setup parameters. No worries. I’ll find out where I’m going astray. I’m getting closer.

    Thanks for the reply.

    April 22, 2015 at 2:33 pm #7652
    cmcgrath5035
    Moderator

    I understand, I should have prefaced that I’m talking open belt machines e.g. Shapeoko and relatively slow feed rates.
    So you obviously have CNC experience, and understand when I comment that feed rates are typically dictated by cut depth and material parameters.

    I am not aware of a set of ‘recommended ‘ ballscrew machine parameters.
    Have a look thru the header files here

    Perhaps you will see something that looks like your machine, based on travel per revolution?

    Your could also post settings in a file (dropbox, etc.) so perhaps another user with similar machine will stop by and comment?

    Think of jerk as an “aggressiveness factor’ influencing the commands to ramp speed up and down.So higher jerk values accelerate and decelerate faster, machine overall runs faster, but likely a bit noisier than less aggressive acceleration machines

    Also, what FW version are you running on your tinyG? There were older versions that turned my NEMA 17s into jackhammers on certain jobs.
    If you are not running fw ($fb) 440.14, you should be.

    Can you (relatively) easily release your belts and just run the job spinning the motors, but not moving?
    Perhaps that will help establish what I would expect to be the ‘noise floor’.

    • This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by cmcgrath5035.
    April 23, 2015 at 9:17 am #7655
    rs274
    Member

    Great call on removing the belts. Apparently dirt cheap bearing blocks have a lot of slop in them, oops. The Y axis motor that sits on the X carriage is micro-vibrating with each step amplifying the stepping sounds with the bearings dancing on the rails.

    I have two bearing blocks per rail and there is very minimal slop by hand. It shows .0012 inches of play on my dial indicator, but I’m not sure how much of that is the rails flexing vs how much is the bearings vs how much is the carriage rolling.

    Still, removing the motor makes it behave like my X motor, which is what I expect from a stepper.

    I have a couple medium grade bearing blocks I’ll try to swap out after I make a new mount to house them and the motor. But this is obviously not a tinyg settings issue.

    Thanks.

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