Sugestión for Duet v4
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Hi
After a while testing another controller board... There is one aspect that I think could be very interesting that Duet v4 included.... And it is that the drivers of the engines were not fixed, they could be changed.... This, I think, has advantages... One of them, if a driver burns, as happened to me in 2 of the duet board, you do not have to throw the plate in the trash, or send it to repair, with buying a spare Driver you solve it ... And if in the future they release a new driver with better feature, You can change them in an easy way... In addition to lowering the cost of the board
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@peirof the disadvantage of the stepsticks are: Easy to misplug which at best blows the driver, and at worst takes out other components of the board. Just today someone mentioned this on the RatRig discord and the error blew up the driver, the MCU, and the RPi that was connected also suffered irrevocable damage.
On top of that, the SMD mounted drivers have better thermal performance because they are passively cooled by the 2oz copper PCB and use thermal vias to dump heat on the back of the board.
Another point is that Step Stick drivers require more space on the board so to get the same amount of drivers the board needs to be larger or other components need to go.
Switching to "newer" drivers is not just a simple case of swapping them out, they also need to be supported in software if they grow relevant features.
In closing, I would say there are upsides and downsides between step sticks and SMD mounted drivers, but I prefer SMD mounted ones on average. And yes, I blew a driver too, but at the time I did some sloppy work and disregarded multiple warnings by the firmware about phase mismatch, so that's on me.
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One more reason against stepsticks: They have limited capacity for high current drivers. You wouldn't be able to run the 5161s with high current as on the 6HC on such a small piece of PCB because it lacks the space for the external voltage regulators. And since the next frontier in high performance printing seems to be high voltage high current driven steppers, moving to stepstick would be a net negative. Bigfoot format like troodon uses might work but is so rare it probably isn't worth the trouble over integrated circuitry.
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@peirof surely the answer to this is the Duet 3 6XD?
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How bout duet specific stepsticks that are keyed so they aren't plugged in incorrectly but still field replaceable.
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@breed that wouldn't address any of the other concerns. That said, in a way the 2stepper expansion board for the Duet 3 mini is something along those lines; and since it's an open source design anyone could go and make an adapter board that slots in there. If there's a market for it, it'll prove the claim this is a big advantage (-:
