Hi
Any members here who are using the smooth stepper ?

 

What is smoothe stepper? Stepper motor never turns smooth like do sinus-fed motors. Of course, the microstep regime heavily eases the jump-step character, but anyway it never isn`t completely smooth. That is why we condemned our vacuum levitated crystall growing (Czochralsky) equipment project planned steppermotor (with ulta many microsteps) and installed another solution instead.

 

This one.
A CNC motion controller

 

This one.
A CNC motion controller

Push my nose into and have a signalizing smell thats a tradename having no any improvements over existing microstep regime. Thus, Your question is question about the Tradeemark, and in this I have no experience. I am using Chineese 5 Eur controllers not 220 Eur controllers, but don`t think there is significant difference except the well doccumented reliability paper sheet. Thus, the real bill is 5 Eur for gadget and 215 Eur for paper sheet.

 

At the bottom of the product details page it says.
*SmoothStepper Motor signal outputs are only 5V and 24 mA or 32 mA. This will not drive a Stepper Motor directly, and you will need a Motor Driver for each stepper motor.
So you still need Motor Drivers and the best you get is microstepping.

 

Pardon me for limited info provided.
I am planning to buy to install in my CNC.
The one I have is a parallel port card, which is giving me headache. Limited IO and skipping steps if my PC gets buzy at times

I was wondering if any one is using this controller.

 

skipping steps if my PC gets buzy at times

I have heard not to use a laptop for CNC because they do housekeeping a lot that interrupts the I/O stream.
For that reason, I wouldn’t have a desktop running any other programs while doing CNC.

 

A PC running some non-microspht OS or maybe machine code could possibly do a fair job with simple CNC tasks, maybe. But certainly MS products are not for controls where timing measured in seconds or minutes matters.
And it may be that it is possible to generate smooth speed ramp-ups for stepper drives. But a stepping motor is by definition a stepper and that means not smooth. No matter what it is called, stepping is not smooth.

 

I am using a desktop, and is not used for any other purpose.
and smooth or not is not the issue. I guess no body is using this controller here in this forum. I have done a lot of viewing on the controller. I guess it is one of the best and Ethernet control is better than USB

 

I am using a desktop, and is not used for any other purpose.
and smooth or not is not the issue. I guess no body is using this controller here in this forum. I have done a lot of viewing on the controller. I guess it is one of the best and Ethernet control is better than USB

There is some pretty good open source Arduino code that only does G-code to stepper motor control. Instantaneous. No delays for OS checks.

 

That "smooth stepper STILL NEEDS a MOTOR DRIVER, and so I suggest that you look tor a stepper controller that includes the motor driver.

 

I am using a desktop, and is not used for any other purpose.

If it’s running a Microsoft desktop, the best you can say is that it’s not running anything else, that you are are of!

Windows has many tasks running in the background that can affect the timing of a foreground app.

 

You need to understand that windows top priority is running iit's own housekeeping routines. After that comes checking for updates and patches and such. So there is no promise at all that any other operation will not be delayed for even many seconds.

 

You need to understand that windows top priority is running iit's own housekeeping routines. After that comes checking for updates and patches and such. So there is no promise at all that any other operation will not be delayed for even many seconds.

The motion controller quoted, like others of its ilk, uses the PC and a program such as PC based Mach3/4 etc, as a Trajectory planner and hands over the commands to the external controller.
This eliminates or reduces the effect of what else the PC is doing.
The cards I use, Galil Motion, sit in a PC slot and are self contained and also just use the PC as a HMI, the CNC motion loop is carried out solely and independently by the the card itself.
(12Mhz feedback loop). !

Those that chose to use Mach3/4 alone, then have to be very careful of not running any other PGM at the same time.

 

The Galil products are in an entirely different realm as far as capabilities go, from what I have seen. Also a higher quality all around.

 

The Galil products are in an entirely different realm as far as capabilities go, from what I have seen. Also a higher quality all around.

I was using them as an example of a separate trajectory controller to the HMI. The OP's SmoothStepper qualifies as this somewhat.
I started using Galil practically since their inception, '80's ?

 

Years ago we were tasked with designing a cladding weld system. The idea was to place a clad weld inside about a 4" stainless steel (316) tube about 3' long. The weld wire was constantan as I recall. The tube rotated at maybe 1 RPM and each revolution was 0.1 inch so ten revolutions covered an inch of travel. It was a long and slow process with absolutely no margin of error. We used 1 stepper motor for weld head travel through the tube on a leadscrew and another stepper motor to control tube rotation. Each motor drove a 50:1 mechanical gearbox. I have long forgotten the leadscrew pitch. This was maybe mid to late 90s must have been late because the PC which controlled everything was an old XT or maybe AT box running Opto 22 hardware on maybe Windows 98. The stepper motors were beast, these were the motors and these were the motor drivers. To get very smooth rotation and travel was a matter the 50:1 gear box reducers. Talk about smooth from a stepper it was all in the gear reduction and quality gear reduction less any backlash. The process ran about 3.5 hours as I recall and it may have been longer. We constantly monitored 5 parameters and recorded them for the entire run process. Weld current was about 200 or 250 amps, arc voltage control about 12.6 volts. Rotational speed of the tube and travel of the tube were constantly recorded. The software was all done in VB 6.0 as I recall. A single burb and we had a very nice piece of scrap. Those Anaheim Automation motors and drivers were at the time the best money could buy and the motors weighed over 10 pounds costing over $1,000 USD each. The controllers were about $700 USD. The motors had 1/2" OD shafts. The weld power supplies were either Lincoln or Miller as we used quite a bit of both. Here nor there. All of the mechanical movement was really super smooth and these were the linked stepper motors full 1.8 degree steps 200 steps per revolution, Those motors delivered dome serious torque. I believe Anaheim Automation is still alive and well. When designed right and the right stepper motor is chosen you can indeed get very smooth operation and precise operation from a stepper.

Slightly off topic but smooth operation from a stepper.

Ron

 

The motion controller quoted, like others of its ilk, uses the PC and a program such as PC based Mach3/4 etc, as a Trajectory planner and hands over the commands to the external controller.
This eliminates or reduces the effect of what else the PC is doing.
The cards I use, Galil Motion, sit in a PC slot and are self contained and also just use the PC as a HMI, the CNC motion loop is carried out solely and independently by the the card itself.
(12Mhz feedback loop). !

Those that chose to use Mach3/4 alone, then have to be very careful of not running any other PGM at the same time.

That was the info I was looking for.
So this motion controller can eliminate the issue I get from bzy PC. Right ?

 

That "smooth stepper STILL NEEDS a MOTOR DRIVER, and so I suggest that you look tor a stepper controller that includes the motor driver.

I have a working CNC with bugs in it

 

That was the info I was looking for.
So this motion controller can eliminate the issue I get from bzy PC. Right ?

Yes, it should eliminate it, or at least reduce it drastically.
Have you tested it ensuring no other program running while using the motion control?