I have been umming and ahhing over which stepper motors and drivers to buy for my mini mill for over a year now and not really making any progress on making a decision.
The other day I was comparing prices of nema 23 stepper motors once again when I came across some for sale by ebay seller rycycleitnow.
This was a set of 4 x 23HS2430B motors, which are 3A 3Nm (425 oz/in) motors,
4 x CW5045 stepper drivers,
a breakout board,
parallel cable and a USB cable all for £125.00 ($190.00) and free shipping.
With most other vendors, I would struggle to buy just the motors for that figure, and then the same again for the stepper drivers.
I also noticed that there was a ‘Best Offer’ option, so I took a punt and placed an offer of £110.00 and almost fell off my chair when it was automatically accepted! – It makes me wonder how low I could have gone and still won them.
There was the added bonus of the fact that they were already in the country, so I would not have to pay any import duty, and they turned up on my doorstep in less than a week.
I like the idea of keeping the ends of the stepper motors neat and tidy, so had been looking at this thing on Thingiverse,
and also this variant by Hoss.
Unfortunately, I could not use either of them as my steppers had a different screw pattern on the end
so I decided to design my own in Sketchup.
I also decided to put my own twist on the design and add the axis information as well.
This is the X axis cover with the 4 pin connector trial fitted.
The connectors are Chinese 4 pin ‘aviation’ plugs with an M16 thread that I bought from ebay seller ecamonline2012 for £13.50 ($20.90) for 5 packs of 5 male and female connectors, or £0.54 ($0.82) per pair of connectors.
I also bought some caps, from ebay seller rfsuppliers for £8.75 ($13.56) for a pack of 10, to use on the power supply end to cover any outputs I am not using, as attempting to locate these connectors with the chassis pins shielded, was more trouble than it was worth.
The caps are actually intended for use with N type Jack connectors which normally have an imperial thread, so these were a bit of a punt, but as it turns out these caps actually have an M16 metric thread that mates with my ‘aviation’ plugs.