Hi everyone.
I have been running my Farmbot at 100% current on all axis which was causing over heating of X2 motor drive chip that was causing movement failures at what seemed to be random times. They were not random but the drive chip has an over temperature detection which turns the chip off so it can cool down. I added a heatsink across all four driver chips with helps with the overheating but the heatsink was still at 70 ° C which is too hot for my liking. So I turned my attention to current reduction.
I am interested if people have reduced their current settings and do what level
If you have reduced your current settings to below 100%, can you let me know to what settings you used and how successful it was? At 100%, my soak testing causes the stepper motor driver chips to over heat thus I am looking at reducing the current
Using my X, Y and Z soak test scripts, I have been able to reduce the current draw for the motors significantly, whilst maintaining reliability.
X = 60 %
Y = 40 %
Z = 70%
I got the these values by running my soak test scripts (one axis at a time) then modifying the motor current setting down to 10 % and incrementing by 10 % at a time until the soak test run without error. I then added 20% extra current as a safety margin.
Soak test scripts are here