My NEMA 17 stepper motors and 12V power supply arrived yesterday and I managed to get them wired up and ready for a test.
First off I brought the NEMA 17 stepper motors from the eBay store infoshine15. It took me a good while to find motors I was happy with. I wasn’t over the moon about the 1.8A rated current as my stepper drives only do up to 2A and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to push them too much considering how many hours a 3D printer is usually on and running.
But my drivers in my RAMPS kit came with little heat sinks on them so I decided it would be fine. Motors were good quality and at $82 USD for 4 motors ($20.5 each) I thought it was an okay deal.
Next up is the power supply. It is a generic 12 volt 30 amp power supply you can find all over ebay by just searching “12V power supply”. It does the trick, what else can I say!
It took me quite a while to triple check all my wiring, solder the cables to the steppers, install the software, configure the software and finally get it working. I’m using the Marlin firmware on the Arduino and the Pronterface software for communicating with the Arduino.
I had a weird problem that at first seemed software or maybe even hardware related. My stepper motors had very erratic behaviour. They would stall, not move, only one would go – It was a bit of a nightmare.
After some thought I realised starving the motors of enough power could lead to these kind of issues. Sure enough the potentiometers for regulating current on each stepper driver were turned all the way down. After turning the potentiometer clockwise backed off just a hair from full the stepper motors began to function correctly.
Teething issues over I was able to jog the stepper and verify everything was working as it should!
Here is a video of the motors up and running:
