I recently asked a friend who built his own CNC to help me calculate how many steps my steppers needed to do in order to move x distance. So he worked it out at being 1016 steps. Now I'm using Nema 23 motors with m335 drivers with no micro step directly mounted via couplings to the Chinese 1605 ballscrews. So I've entered this step amount into the motors tuning on mach 3 and then proceeded to measure the distance travelled and then compared it to the DRO (natural set to MM) and it didn't match. Now I went ahead and tried the trial and method to calculate it just by decreasing it till I matched the travelled amount to what the DRO in mach 3 was showing which was 400 steps. Now I'd just like to clarify on why there is a huge difference in calculated steps to what I have found to be accurate?
The 1605 moves 5mm in one revolution.
At 200 steps per revolution = 5/200 = .025 per step.
1/.025 = 40 steps per mm
40*25.4 = 1016 per inch.
Are you working in inches or mm, mach3 will do which ever it is set to.
With that ballscrew it will work much smoother with microstepping.
Now I'm pretty new to using Mach 3 and still learning the ropes but I have set it to MM via the select native units but it still looks like its using Inches on the DRO. I can set to 1/8 micro steps so would that then just be 8128 steps?
They are Nema 23's but no idea beyond that but Ive just been having a conversation with him about it as I found 400 steps to be the correct amount. Now it was all set to metric so he found out and thus the calculation adjusted was 400 steps which matched what I found.