Duet 3 with E3D Toolchanger setup - small Stepper Motor question

[technosworld]

This may be a stupid question, but I'm designing a printer using the Duet3 interface and wanted to find out with the tiny stepper motor that is being used for the toolchanges, if there's any other portion of the Duet3 it could work with beside the regular stepper drivers. I'd like to be able to use the 6 stepper drivers for other things, and this motor only requires a very small current and turns 1/4 rotation to pick up tools.

Electrical:

400mA phase current RMS
3mH inductance

Interface:

Motor connector: Molex PicoBlade 051021-0400

Here's a link to the full specs of the motor:

https://e3d-online.dozuki.com/Document/rHGYlVFPjvVugPyy/Toolchanger-ToolHead-Stepper-M.pdf

[dc42]

There is no reason why you can't drive additional motors of that type from spare motor outputs on a Duet 3.

[technosworld]

Great, so it that referring to one of the IO Headers then?

[dc42]

No, it would have to be driven from one of the stepper motor output headers.

[raykholo]

David,

It sounds like OP wants to use the 6 high power stepper drivers on the Duet 3 for other purposes, and is essentially asking whether he can tap a stepstick into some IO pins directly on the Duet 3 Mainboard.

You are saying that this is not possible, and that you have to use the 6 onboard drivers and that a 3HC (or 1LC) expansion board is the only way to do more stepper drivers - is my understanding correct?

[dc42]

That's right, you can't drive a stepper motor from the I/O pins, even small ones.

It should be possible to use a SammyC21 and 2 or 3 stepsticks to drive some additional small motors.