Digital current control
Boards based on Smoothie use digital potentiometers instead of manual potentiomenters.
Instead of using a screwdriver to set the current value for the stepper motor driver (which can be quite imprecise), you simply set the value in the configuration file.
These are the names of the different stepper motors/drivers, and the corresponding values to change:
NOTE These designations are hard coded to M1-M5 and do not track any changes that may have been made to the pin mapping for the motors.
| Label on the Smoothieboard | M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Axis in a cartesian machine | X (left-right) | Y (front-back) | Z (up-down) | E0 (first extruder) | E1 (second extruder) |
| Greek letter | α (alpha) | β (beta) | γ (gamma) | δ (delta) | ε (epsilon) |
| Current setting configuration option | alpha_current | beta_current | gamma_current | delta_current | epsilon_current |
The value is in Amperes, and is generally found on the motor itself, or in it's datasheet.
You can find and set these values in the configuration file.
They are found near the other values for a given axis, for example :
beta_step_pin 2.1 # Pin for beta stepper step signal beta_dir_pin 0.11 # Pin for beta stepper direction beta_en_pin 0.10 # Pin for beta enable beta_current 1.5 # Y stepper motor current beta_max_rate 30000.0 # mm/min
The current can also be set using M907 where XYZ set the current for alpha,beta, gamma, and ABC set the current for delta, epsilon and zeta respectively. These are saved with M503 in the config-override, use M503 to see the current setting.
NOTE on smoothieboards that use an I2C based current controller it is NOT recommended to issue M907 in GCode files.
External resources
