Stepper Driver Review

Loosing control with your drivers?

Warning. Long driver rant in this post

After printing with the always trusted DRV8825 stepper drivers on a 24v powered mks gen 1.4 I have been curious about the TMC hype for silent printing

This led me to testing first the 2100, then the 2130s with nothing but failed prints. The V-King 3d printer is designed for high acceleration and jerk so I was not looking to slow this down to much. Also running in spread cycle was not that interesting

In the prosess I also tested the MKS Gen L controller which seems like a good budget board for a 8 bit controller setup

After recognizing the lack of power from the TMC21xx I wanted to try the TMC2208 as they were said to be stronger. I did not get these drivers to run all my axes so for driving Z and E I had to use the DRV8825. Also I had to turn vref down to 1250 as they got hot and acceleration down from 2000 to 1500

This made for a usable setup on the mks controllers but active cooling should be applied. I also know there are some SD2224 that could be an option and I recently came across the sST820 as Stepsticks so I will try those as well just to know a little more about different configurations people will run

I also have a DUET Wifi which I have not been friends with and although it is great hardware and you can customize everything on the fly but many features you like to have as standard is not there and need to be configured

Conclusion:
In 95% of configurations most people would be happy with the $30 mks/drv/marlin controller as long as noise is not a problem. The TMC21xx could be used on Cartesian Mendel/Prusa type printers with low acceleration and the TMC2208 can be configured to work on XY in a corexy printer with high acceleration and jerk

The $140 duet wifi/tmc2660 /reprap controller is nice but can not be justified in terms of price if you look at print quality alone

Set a goal and never give up!