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 / [email protected]