Pololu High-Power Stepper Motor Driver 36v4

[aboly8000]

Hello
I’m going to make a CNC machine with four pieces of pololu 3730 and arduino due and Repetier-Firmware.
Please advise on how to connect four pololu 3730 pieces to arduino due and how to add a library to Repetier-Firmware and its settings.
What micro-step do you recommend for the CNC machine? 1/256 is good?

[PatrickM]

Hello.

All of the 36v4 drivers would share most of the SPI pins, but each one would have its own STEP, DIR, and SCS pin. To get started, you might check out this thread about connecting two:

Two 36v4 drivers and two stepper motors

First off, I am very new to the world of steppers. I have an arduino v3, two 36v4 Pololu stepper drivers and two Pololu #1478 stepper motors. So far, starting with the example sketch in the Pololu 36v4 stepper library, I have been able to successfully wire-up one motor, power supply, driver and Uno. And to modify the code to change speed, direction and etc. as I wish. The wiring was per TABLE 1. [Table%201] Next I want to add the second driver and motor to my project. For this project,…

Once you have a proposed way to wire it up, you are welcome to post a wiring diagram here and I can check that it seems okay.

We do not have any specific recommendations for using our libraries with Repetier-Firmware

It probably depends on exactly what you are trying to do, but I generally suspect you would want to generally run with as high a microstepping resolution as possible for a CNC application.

By the way, it would probably be easier to control that many stepper motors using our Tic Stepper Motor Controllers. The Tics offer a variety of control interfaces, and the Tic 36v4 is based on the same driver used on our High-Power Stepper Motor Driver 36v4. They can be daisy chained if you use the TTL serial or I2C interface, and we have an Arduino library as well as example codes in the user’s guide.

- Patrick

[aboly8000]

Hello
Thank you very much for your guidance.
Is there no way to use Library 3730 simultaneously with Repetire or Marlin or Grbl frameware?
Tic Stepper Motor Controllers are too expensive for me.

[PatrickM]

We do not provide any software or other direct support for using our drivers with 3D printer firmware. It might be possible to use our library with the firmware you mentioned, but it would be up to you to implement the system or look for a compatible implementation that someone else has already made. If you do find or create a solution, we would be interested to hear about it.

- Patrick

[aboly8000]

I think I should use another Arduino board next to the main Arduino board to configuration the pololu3730 drivers.
What is the cheapest Arduino board that has the ability to install a library and configuration pololu3730?
Can I connect the pins of all four pololu3730 drivers together to Arduino and give them the same settings as one library?

[PatrickM]

I am not sure what the benefit of using another Arduino like that would be, but any microcontroller that can support SPI communication could be used to configure the driver.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, all of your 36v4 drivers would share most of the SPI pins, but each one would have its own STEP, DIR, and SCS pin. There is nothing preventing you from assigning the same settings to all of the drivers.

To learn more about how the 36v4 stepper motor driver works, I strongly recommending you read our documentation on the product page, and the datasheets under the “Resources” tab. It would probably also be helpful for you to carefully examine our Arduino library for the 36v4 driver.

- Patrick