I found on the web a “TL Smoother” for stepper motors. What is it and how does it work?
We do not carry any TL-Smoothers, and I have not used them myself, but it appears TL-Smoothers are boards that just put diodes in series with stepper motor driver outputs. Generally, using diodes like that can help make stepping smoother on certain stepper drivers like the TI DRV8825 with some stepper motors. You can find more detail about what that does in this blog post. We have used more modern stepper drivers like Toshiba’s TB67S2x9FTG family of stepper motor drivers in some 3D printers here with stepper motors that exhibited some roughness with DRV8825 drivers and been happy with the results.
-Nathan
OK, I understand the great info
Is there a driver with the same pin out of the DRV8825? I need to control it with a Raspberry PI 3B and the Stepper Motor I am using has a phase current of 1.5 A per coil. What driver would you use? Yes, I will be using a heat sink with a 30mm cooling fan.
I am a newbie to stepper motors and the drivers to control them, so please bear with me.
Are you using some kind of Raspberry Pi hat board with a 16 pin socket for a stepper driver board? Our TB67S249FTG Stepper Motor Driver Compact Carrier is compatible with that socket and should be able to provide 1.5A per coil output reliably if you have some provisions for cooling. Generally, all the stepper driver carrier boards that fit that 16-pin socket use the same pins for input power and output to the stepper motor. The STEP and DIR pins are probably the most important input pins and are also generally the same for these 16-pin form factor boards. The rest of the pins can vary in functionality between different boards in the form factor, but we generally try to make our boards behave similarly when provided with the same inputs.
For the TB67S249FTG Stepper Motor Driver Compact Carrier I mentioned and our DRV8825 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier board, one difference is the combination of logic inputs on the MODE/DMODE pins that produce a given microstepping resolution. The product pages for those two drivers have tables that provide more detail on the logic inputs required for a given microstepping mode. I recommend looking through those two product pages and letting us know if there is anything there that is unclear to you.
-Nathan