3D Printer drivers/motors

Hi guys,

I recently started researching into making my own 3D printer (which I might do or I might not) but does the stepper motor which feeds the filament into the hot head need it's own A4988 driver? I'm planning to control it using the Arduino Mega and the RAMPS 1.4 board if that helps and is there any thing else I need to use/know before I decide to go ahead on this project?

Thanks in advance!

0 Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to Nate1616

How does the printer know how to auto-home itself and is there any way of setting it?
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0 Robert Peter Oakes over 10 years ago in reply to Former Member

it would just be a start up thing or a button on the UI to initiate it. Basically the printer would start to head to where it thinks the home should be but watching for the limit switches to trigger all the time, as soon as they do, it knows it is home in that direction. You can also have limit switches in the other direction too in order to prevent running away over that side. at the end of the day which set is home is down to where you want X=0, Y=0, Z=0 to be
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0 Former Member over 10 years ago in reply to Nate1616

Does anyone know if the Canon Pixma MG2550 has some stepper motors that I could salvage? I'm trying to get 4 motors to use so I don't want to splash too much money on it.
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0 Former Member over 10 years ago

Of course you need A4988 for extruder, because feeding filament is finished by extruder motor, and motor is drived by A4988.
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