![]() Thank you very much for sharing this - it is a really cool project! There is a tonne of unused potential in these boards for the sake of saving a tiny bit of money. One catch with this swapping is that the E driver uses a different stepping direction to the Z driver by default, so you can either swap the wires around on one Z motor (which means that if you swap the two motors, they would run in the opposite direction to expected a command to move up would cause them to go down), or use firmware config to get them running in the same direction. I ended up switching the Z2 motor to be connected to the E port on the Creality board, and using the newly-UARTified driver to control the extruder to be able to use linear advance. ![]() Again, a small PCB to intercept and break out the two unused pins was made. While I was at it, I also used one of the pins on the LCD connector which wasn’t originally in use for the E3V2’s colour display, in order to provide UART control for that driver only. Original wrong info struck out and replaced with the correct info.ĮDIT 2 (10/Apr/23): I should also mention (well after the fact) that I eventually designed a small carrier PCB for the stepper driver, capacitor and connectors. For some reason, the 4.2.7 boards only have pads for the debug header this uses it was easy enough to add pins, but it's another thing that needs to be done.ĮDIT: I got it wrong originally regarding the two boards using different microstepping values. One small wire cut later and everything was fine. So by default, the original driver was stepping fourtwo times the distance of the new driver. However, simply copying the setting of the microstep pins from the instruction (written for a TMC2208) caused the new (TMC2225) driver to step in 1/32 mode, rather than 1/16 mode. In addition, the 4.2.7 board is set to have all drivers use 1/8 1/16 microsteps, rather thanmatching the 1/16 on the 4.2.2 board. One gotcha I found is that my extra driver is a TMC2225 driver (it's what was locally available, and matches the board drivers), which have a different microstep setup: MS1 ![]() The video below elaborates a bit more on how these motors are driven, and such a small stepper setup could serve as both an interesting component for a very small robot etc, but as a neat learning tool since there’s no complication of using separate drivers.I just implemented this on my build, which is on a 4.2.7 board. The biggest challenge here, or at least the most delicate part, is actually connecting the wires together, given the very small scale. More background about how this type of motor works is found in the video below. Software-wise, one can then use Arduino’s built-in stepper library, other available code, or even write your own. You simply need to connect each of the four leads to an output, controlling the outputs in what amounts to a rudimentary H-bridge configuration. According to Jaiswal, these mini motors require such a small amount of power that they can even be driven directly, at least in some cases, by an Arduino’s output pins. With ridiculously low prices, and typically extremely long lead times, however, sometimes it’s worth ordering a few for experiments. What you’ll do with something like this is left, as they say, as an exercise for the reader.
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