Quote Originally Posted by Neale View Post
but the basic supply to the drivers can be pretty crude by comparison. In fact, a simple linear power supply will beat the pants off a switched-mode supply when it comes to feeding stepper drivers as you have to drastically over-spec the SMPS to cope with the odd peak load which causes it to go into shutdown or some other protective mode where the linear supply just dips a bit and carries on.
Neale is 100% spot on and using an SMPS is asking for trouble because at some point it will bite you when it goes into protection mode. KISS works for CNC no need for over complicating the job with Surge protectors or UPS, DHL, FedEx or any other courier service...

Now back to these drives and the Question of AC or DC. I've used these drives with both AC & DC and in terms of performance, I've seen no differences.
However, I've never run them on machines working in harsh conditions regards power fluctuations, etc but I suspect that if the mains supply was prone to fluctuations or was a little dirty then using a DC supply would be less stressful on the drives due to larger Caps being more capable of smoothing out the power than the little caps that will be used on the individual drives.

Now I'm not into electronics so I don't know if when using a DC supply the drives still use their onboard Caps as extra smoothing.? . . my gut says they probably do.!

But that said I would always go with the simple approach if normal conditions so AC is easier and cheaper. The machine doesn't care if you run it on Everyready battery's so long as it gets a nice supply of power when it asks for it.