I bought 5x E3D HT Motors and swapped them out for the lower torque rated Chinese motors that came with my printer. Aside from doubling the e-steps due to moving from 1.8 to .9 degree motors nothing changed. My calibration cubes printed flawlessly without additional calibration. Then I started real prints and everything fell apart, now I cant print/travel north of 30mm/s and 5 on jerk setting or I get horrible step skipping in both x and y. Checked voltages and everything looks good. running marlin 1.18 and didnt have any issues until swapping to the E3d High Torque .9 degree motors. They have more torque and come from E3d, how are the stock cheap lower torque Chinese motors out performing the E3D ones? HELP Please Im losing my mind on this one. -B
What was the rated current of the motors you replaced? Some recent 3D printers and kits use low current motors and 24V power, and set the driver current quite low to suit them. What type of printer do you have? For delta printers in particular, you generally need to use 24V power when using 0.9deg motors. What microstepping are you using, and what is your steps/mm setting? 0.9deg motors need twice the step pulse frequency of 1.8deg motors, and if you are using high microstepping then 8-bit electronics might struggle to generate the step pulses fast enough.
Maybe you have to dial down the current on the drivers? Are they getting hot or they stay cold? If cold give it more current.
It seems to be a theme on this forum.. buy from E3D, something does not work (where only one out of a thousand things on a printer is from E3D) ..........then Blame E3D........... THEN! ask for help from the forum members which include E3D ! Something is obviously different. Try looking at the spec of both Chinese and E3D supplied stepper motors and see what else other than the change from 1.8 o to 0.9 o (of which I'm not an expert) is different. Follow the advice that maybe there isn't enough power/voltage, this is an art, getting it right. See numerous posts on how to adjust. More powerful motors = more juice required. (there was a good post (here) on adjusting motor voltage which I have quoted before, I will try and find it) I would hazard a guess that .... A. The E3D motors are (also) made in China. B. The E3D supplied motors work. C. They need more juice than the original motors. (which maybe your board can't supply?) Odd is the calibration cubes worked, but things like this happen, my Benchy test print worked perfectly as my very first BigBox print, but my next print didn't, but it wasn't E3D's fault Try the test cubes again (assuming nothing like motor voltage isn't changed) it will be interesting to see if they still work, report on this and then it can be taken from there.
Wow... not sure whwere you are going with this..... I came for support on an E3D product, I didnt blame anyone/anything much less the parts or the company...???? Most of your points here ignore direct statements in my post (i.e. voltage tuning already done, never suggested the motors where defective) or reference inferences I never made (Blame E3d), or infer facts that are incorrect (I also have an E3D v6 hotend)...??? I came here for the type of insight given by dc43. Feel free to ignore this thread if you are not interested in helping a fellow maker trying to improve their printer with quality E3D parts.
No current ratings published for the stock motors that Im aware of, or torque for that matter. I have a multimeter, but not sure how to test for rated limits of a stepper motor, I do have high confidence that E3D motors are of higher torque based on size/weight and of higher manufacturing quality as it comes from E3D. Its a CR-10S (about a year old) not sure which board revision mine came with, I think it was a v2 Creality Melzi?(Dual Z and bootloader not found on the v1's) Its a 12v system and in tuning old and new motors I have not tested any power faults of the power supply even though its not of meanwell or atx quality. I checked my marlin configs: microstep mode, tmc, L6470, I2C sections all show 16, but I dont think any of them apply to my board/stepper drivers. Likely using 16, cant find appropriate place to override it. X/Y 160 steps/mm. FB group suggested 8bit might/will struggle to run .9's too. I have an EinsyRambo with tmc's but its still 8bit, and a MKS SBase v1.3 smoothie knockoff which is 32bit but it only has DRV8825 drivers. I could swap the Einsy easilly due to my familiarity w/ marlin, hesitant to drop in the smoothie until I can learn that board/firmware. Ill be buying a duet for my other machine(being built) but am not ready in that build for the board and am hesitant to get one just to troubleshoot this issue. If it is just the microstepping pulse, any above options/ones I have not considered you might recommend? Thanks Bryan
Check whether there is a part number label on the motors. If there is, search for that part number on the web. if the printer has dual Z motors, the Z motors may be different from the X and Y motors. If there is no part number, measure the resistance of one winding with your multimeter. Then search a catalog of stepper motors (e.g. https://www.omc-stepperonline.com/) for a motor with the same NEMA size and length as your motors, and similar resistance. x16 microstepping is common, and using x16 with 0.9deg motors on a Cartesian printer with belt-driven X and Y axes is unlikely to require faster step pulse generation than your electronics can handle, even using 8-bit electronics. Unless Marlin has got worse than I remember it. The TMC drivers on the Einsy are not good for high current motors, but at least you'll know what current you are setting because AFAIR the Einsy provides software setting of motor current. DRV8825 drivers should be able to handle the E3D motors, but you may need to add TL Smoothers or similar to work around the known low current microstepping issue of the TMC8825. What stepper driver ships does your current board use? Some chips (especially DRV8825) need the step pulse timing to be extended, to avoid skipped steps at high step rates e.g. when Marlin switches to double stepping.
