Motor settings for up/down movement on z-axis to reduce noise/vibrations

My z-axis movements produce a lot of vibrations and noise when going down. I can avoid this by increasing the maximum speed, BUT then moving up fails due to reduced power (more speed = less power).

This is a pity, because I need to use low speed on z-axis which results in much vibration = very loud noise…

It would be great to be able to set different motor settigns (speed, stepping, micro-stepping) for moving up or down the z-axis!!!

Thank you

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Set up 1/2 microstepping will help somewhat with default drivers.

Check if you have at least slight distance between z axis motor axis and leadscrew (so that it does not touch aluminium plate when rotating.

Also you can use nema 17 damper to reduce vibrations.

U can use graphite powder to lubricate z axis.(dirty hack - you can also use home made powder from pencil, although thats not as good as regular lube) .

If you want to go absolutely quiet, you might want to consider changing motor driver (i changed mine for tmc 2208)

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I posted the guide for replacement here:

And recently I had issues with microstepping - I have reported it to the forum but can’t find topic anymore. however - these settings work for me now (please note that I have TMC2208 only on X and Y axis right now, so you should ignore Z axis settings in your case :slight_smile: (I have no explanation why these settings work for X and Y axis with 1/2 microstepping, in my opinion they should not - but they do :slight_smile: )

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@eide
Thank you.
I had done these things already:

  • slight distance between z axis motor axis and leadscrew
  • nema 17 damper
  • graphite powder

But the micro stepping was the big win!!! :slight_smile:

Thx once more
Markus

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I have the same situation. I set micro-stepping to 2 “Microsteps per step”, and the app adjusted “Steps per mm” to 2.5, and “Encoder Scaling” to 2778 (according to the formulas in the documentation)
But this doesnt work, motor and encoder coordinates are out of sync then…

I did the same as you, I set the values back to the previous values “Steps per mm” to 5, and “Encoder Scaling” to 5556, now it works.
@roryaronson: How can this be? is it different on Genesis 1.4 then stated in the docs?

Thx
Markus

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