Ah, it's the weekend, and time for more work on the Green Machine. NOT! Too sunny, and too much honey-do. Manual labor gives me time to think, and today it's about steppers and Acme-threaded rod.
Like probably everyone, I wish I could start out with powerful steppers and leadscrews. The reality is that I am building this thing on the cheap-as-appropriate mode. I bought Gecko drivers because they seem to be the gold standard. When this started out as a Keinbauer project, I bought three IH234012 steppers from CAMtronics, planning to run them in 8 wire parallel for maximum speed. These should give me 157 oz-inches of torque, not large when compared to many projects I see out there.
So here's the dilemma de jure: should I stick with these (paid-for) steppers, and set up with single-start acme rod because of the relatively low power? This will get me up and running, get some cash flow coming in, and then I can upgrade to more powerful motors and multi-start acme rod for X and Y axes down the road. Yes, I'll be buying stuff twice, which goes against my nature, but bootstrapping is how we are getting this done at all!  |