Pololu Stepper Drivers Are Awesome
I posted this to the MakerGear message board, but I figured this warranted it's own blog post.
I tested it tonight by hooking it up to an arduino. Wow it is sooooo much quieter and the motor itself is cooler than the extruder controller was running it. Now I can really see why everyone is moving to Pololu boards. Compare it with how it was before with the standard setup.
When I first turned it on, it barely moved and was clicking. It was probably overheating because the screw/nut heatsink was really hot. I had to turn the pot on the pololu board way down. Now it works fine and the heatsink isn't very hot at all. I really should get one of these real heat sinks to put on it instead, but this is what Rick at MakerGear suggested I try since he couldn't find any small enough.
Also, I'm 99% certain that at least with the RepRap style wiring and firmware, I need to hook it up to the SDA/SCL ports on the motherboard. I found reference to someone else doing the same thing. Tomorrow I'll try to control it with the reprap.
The arduino test sketch I used turns the enable pin high/low instead of just grounding it so it should be possible to control that with some changes to the reprap firmware and attaching it to a spare pin on the motherboard.
Now I want to make it more permanent with stripboard instead of a breadboard, so I need to order some stuff. These are the parts I came up with from Futurlec. Their website is one of the clearest electronics parts sellers I've found so far. I'm definitely going to do this with my MakerBot too eventually!
Update: I got it working with the reprap motherboard.
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