Section 2: Stepper Motor Basics
| The advanced features such as StallGuard can be purchased in our PDF guide here. |
Let's quickly discuss some basic information about stepper motors.
I won’t go too deep here and will mainly cover what needs to be understood later in this course. I recommend watching this quick video below.
The most important thing to understand is that the average stepper motor has 50 physical teeth around the rotor.
The term "Full Step" means that the motor moves 1/4 of these 50 steps at a time. If it turns 200 full steps, the motor will have completed 1 full revolution.
However, turning a stepper motor in full step mode is rather violent. The motor vibrates excessively and is very noisy in the process. That is why the TMC2209 does not even allow us to use full step mode. It automatically translates one full step into 256 microsteps, making motor operations extremely smooth.
The term "Microsteps" is when the motor driver moves a fraction of a full step. Imagine slicing one of those 200 full steps into 256 small parts. The motor can be made to stop at any of those exact microsteps.
With 256 microsteps, we can divide each revolution in 51,200 steps! That's because if we have 200 steps, and each step has 256 microsteps, that is 200 x 256 = 51,200!
NEXT SECTION: 3
Course Sections:
- Section 0: Background
- Section 1: Hardware Setup
- Section 2: Stepper Motor Basics
- Section 3: Power Requirements
- Section 4: Arduino Setup
- Section 5: Understanding Trinamic Drivers
- Section 6: TMCStepper Library
- Section 7: FastAccelStepper Library
- Section 8: ESP32 Dual Core Setup
- Section 9: Motor Setup
- Section 10: Understanding Positioning
Advanced Sections: