Febraury Meeting - Demo Night

[Bart Dring]

This month's meeting will be demo night.  Bring something cool to show of.  Here is a link to the announcement.

 

http://www.meetup.com/CNC-Build-Club/events/219546323/

 

I'll have a CNC or Inventables related door prize for a random person who RSVPs on meetup and is present.  Don't expect a Carvey ;-).

[Bart Dring]

I have another last minute addition to the demo list.

 

I just got some Trinamic TMC2100 stepper drivers.  This is a brand new and hard to get stepper driver chip.  Trinamic has been making some amazing stepper drivers, but they have all been pretty pricy for DIY products and often required additional resources from the CPU not present in most DIY firmware.  These chips might (when generally available) be in the same price range as the typical Allegro Micro and TI chips that most people use.  It has these cool features.

 

• SteathChop Mode: This uses a voltage based regulation to achieve near zero stepper noise.  It is a quiet as a DC motor.  The power is significantly decreased in this mode.
• SpreadCycle: Smoother operation across all power levels.
• MicroPlyer: Your controller sees the resolution as 2 to 16 microsteps, but the stepper driver can interpolate that internally to 256 microsteps to get smoother operation 
• Automatic idle current reduction.