Hi, in an effort to quieten my Workbee 1010 I just replaced my Makita router with a water cooled 800w spindle. This was an improvement, but showed me how loud the stepper motors were when driven by my Openbuilds Black Box. they sound like a bunch of angry bees! I'd like to change the stepper drivers to quieten things down in mych the same way that changing A4988's on a 3d printer to TMC2208's drops the noise level to a trivial amount of residual noise. Looking for options. I have a set of DM542A stepper controllers, breakout board, copy of UUCNC and an UC100 from a previous project that never went ahead. Any ideas about whether these would drive the Workbee High Torque steppers quieter than the Openbuilds Blackbox? I would only have to buy i extra DM542A to get things working if it was worthwhile. Alternatively are there any other drivers you could recommend from a noise point of view? Not too keen on the Duet from Ooznest as I've seen lots of issues with Duets. cheers Gary
Will you hear the steppers while actually cutting things? I have DQ542MA drivers and an Arduino controlling them with GRBL and they do not seem loud at all to me.
You might look back through the BlackBox discussion thread. It seems like there is a way to hook external drivers up to the BlackBox mentioned somewhere in there. You might give it a try for the x and y axes and see where it leads.
DQ542s sounds the same as a BlackBox with the same settings. Turning current down a little helps, but honestly the motors are quieter than the PSU fan, and cutting noise drowns out everyrhing, so don't see the point
Yeah. There are some fancy sine-based stepper drivers out there that are apparently super quiet, but the only steppers I've heard that are like, *quiet*, are closed-loop ones. A set of four closed-loop NEMA 23 motors and driver kits is probably going to run around $400-500. They are pretty amazing, though, without quite getting into the expense of brushless AC servos. Generally you don't spend much time, once the machine is set up, just randomly jogging motors back and forth, though. So while it seems kind of obnoxious at the beginning, once you're actually running parts it's a pretty minor part of the overall noise level.
Perhaps I'm getting a resonance or something. When doing a cut using an 1/8" bit in plywood the motors are contributing as much noise as the cutter. I will hook up the external drivers to the blackbox as Rick suggested if I can find the details. Certainly changing drivers on my 3d printers made a massive difference, so it would surely make a similar change to these steppers. Cheers Gary
Are you sure there isn't a loose wire if you are getting vibration/resonance? My nema 23s on my CNC router are barely louder that the nema 17s on my 3d printer and they are pushing around about 12 pounds. But, my CNC router is very firmly fastened down to a very heavy torsion box table top.
Mine was originally sitting on a table made from 2x4's with a 3/4" mdf top. This was creating a lot of noise so I removed the table top and sat the workbee on the table frame. This reduced noise significantly . The water cooled spindle cut the noise further. Everything works prefectly, If I could quieten the motors, I could get away with not having to build a box to cover it, as the noise level would be acceptable. Hence my query about alternate stepper drivers. I may need to check the current settings on the drivers. What is regarded as the optimism for this? Cheers Gary
Hi, have played with changing current levels on the Blackbox to no avail. I think the noise is just a function of the stepper/driver combination. Have been unable to find any posts on attaching external drivers to the Blackbox - has anyone a link? Tried to do a video but my phone doesn't record the sound well. TIA Gary
