How to force a stepper driver into full step position?
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@DocTrucker I'll leave you to it then. But for info in the past, I have thought about using a machine DRO (digital readout) as a secondary means of measuring the actual print head (and or build plate) position. I've just ordered a 3 axis kit for my milling machine from Ebay for a little over £200 from China. It's exactly the same as those supplied by UK machine suppliers for 2 or 3 times the price. Claimed accuracy is something like 5um (0.005mm) so even if that's out by 10 fold then the "real accuracy" might be 0.05mm. If your budget is really tight, you can pick up a 150mm digital caliper off Ebay for £3 or £4 and chop that up - I've seen people do that as a cheap way of getting a DRO on a lathe tailstock quill. I don't really know what you are doing though, so just ignore this post if none of it is relevant.
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@deckingman Cheers for the hints. I will invite more scrutiny of the work in the future but it is far too early to do so at the moment, I just wanted to test the set at full step for effectiveness but had no idea on how to achieve that.
In a nutshell for those still reading it is set the head to a known position, power cycle, define the current position as the previously set position using G92. Yes there will be some settlement of the drivers, but that is kind of the point!
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When the drivers are disabled (which you can do with M18), M569 will report the current microstep position. This value isn't yet included in the object model.
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Do any of the TMC driver options come with interpolation enabled on full step operation? That would be ideal for this purpose? I think gecko has a driver that does 1/10 interpolation while always keeping your motor on full step (so you have precision) but I am not sure, anyhow 1/256 interpolation on full step (or half step) movement would be ideal.
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MicroPlyer
Microstep interpolator for obtaining full 256 microstep smoothness with lower resolution step inputs starting from fullstepThe 5160 has it, think the 2209 as well
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Isn't that a solution then?
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When the driver is disabled, it's possible to read the microstep counter of a driver using the M569 command with just a P parameter to specify which drive.
