My fabscan-pi kit came with a 200 step motor (17HS8401). I'd like to upgrade to a 400-step motor, but don't know what to choose... There apparently is a 17HM8401 that looks promising, but I want to be sure that I don't go down the path of needing other new hardware or changes to the existing setup.
Can one of you generous souls give me a bit of advice?
Thanks.
@sraasch Wow....I cant believe no one has bothered to chime in....even if just to tell you "as long as electrically they are the same, ie the same (or near enough) voltage, current, and torque rating as the 200s/r steppers, it literally does not matter. The only difference is the step angle, therefore deg per step. Just make sure the config accounts for the step angle (git search 1.8 youll see where it auto populates the config json file) and it should be fine." The biggest issue would be the current rating the stepper controller is expecting, as long as that is set correctly (thus choosing a stepper with the same rating, no need to set a new current limit), and the software knows how far one step pulse is, there is no difference at all to the software.
Also, side note, this whole straight line triangulation thing has been a thing for a long time, back when the internet made noise, the cities were geo, and the angels on fire. The only thing special about this project is the consolidation (then again thats true of pretty much all of the 3d printer and adjacent scene. The only thing we didnt have back then was cheap and accessible steppers and controllers....and the patent that kept such devices from being marketed....), but like taking images of the distortion of a straight line laser and applying some trig to find the surface height from the axis that distorted it....yeah thats old news.... Dont get me wrong, it is a neat trick, and it works. Plus low cost pixel dense cameras, cheaper line lasers (back in the day we would use wine glass stems to make a line laser from a $40 red laser pointer...that is not a typo), the positioning system (ie, steppers. controllers, feedback (hacking a mouse to keep track of turntable position...good times...), or even simply the repeatable precision of modern sub-$20 steppers), and MCU/SBC/dev-board in the market these days is insane compared to what the average joe had access to in the long ago. If your dad wasnt a systems engineer or something, most likely in aerospace, youd be lucky to even have a computer much less a chip programmer to hook up to your 25 pin parallel port.....I dont remember what my original point was, got lost in a rant down nostalgia lane.....Point is, i guess, look around, absorb, connect the dots, understand what and why, try to avoid just following tutorials and plugging wires into premade breakout boards, and youll develop a true bodger hacker way of seeing the world and be just fine in the maker space. You can do it, I believe in you!
No one seems to be around to answer questions either on this online forum or on the Discord server. Perhaps this whole project has been superseded?
