Motor tuning and switches

[JAZZCNC]

Ok well here goes lets hope this sheds some light.!!

Starting with motors and series or parallel wiring.?
This is a choice based on how you arrange the 8 wires. In your case for parallel wiring they should be as below.
Phase A+ = Red + Blue
Phase A- = Yel + Blk
Phase B+ = Wht + Brn
Phase B- = Org + Grn

Setting the drives:
SW 1, 2 , 3 you are correct about and understand correctly.
SW4 Reduces current to Half the Motor current (sw 1,2,3) but only when motor is stood still. This reduce heat build up in motors and should be used so OFF.

SW 5,6,7,8.!! . . . Now this is where it gets interesting and little more complicated. Your motors have 200 FULL steps per revolution so 1.8deg per step.
Micro stepping breaks these FULL steps down into micro steps.
It's here where it gets confuddling for people due to the fact they state 2,4,8,16 etc Microsteps on the drives.??. . . What this actually means is each revolution is ie 8 x 200 = 1600 micro steps per revolution.

Now Micro stepping is often misunderstood by people thinking that it's used for increasing resolution, which it does to some degree, but it's most useful use is for smoothing motor performance. You'll notice your drives can actually Micro step down to some silly figure like 256 so 256 x 200 = 51200 micro steps per rev.
Setting to this degree is pointless as typical stepper motor can only resolve to around 3200 and make real use of them the rest are wasted.
Not only are they wasted they also put excess stress on the PC or Motion control device. This is because more Pulses are required by a factor of the microstepping amount to turn same one revolution. ie 8x micro stepping needs 1600 pulses for one revolution 256x needs 51200 pulse for same revolution.

This brings us nicely to Motor tuning and Micro steps Inside Mach3.?

STEPS PER setting in mach3 motor tuning is How many steps are needed to move ONE UNIT OF MEASUREMENT in your case with mm's units how many steps to move 1mm.
This is detemined by a calculation taking the Microstepping amount and dividing by PITCH of the ballscrew or how far ONE revolution of moves that particular axis.
So assuming 10mm pitch ballscrews and 8 x 200 =1600 micro steps the STEPS PER 1mm would be 1600/10=160

This will mean 160 steps moves 1mm.

Now Velocity and acceleration are limited by the number of pulses the Motion control device can output. This is known as the Frequency or Kernal speed in Mach3.
The parallel port is quite limited and safe frequency would be 25Khz or 25,000 pulses per second/per axis. This means frequency directly affects the Maximum velocity in this case mm/per min you can achive from the axis. So working with 1600 micro steps we get 25000x60/(1600/10)= 9375mm/min Max velocity.

Now if we use less microstepping so 4x micro steps(800) Max velocity changes to 25000x60/(800/10)=18750mm/min max velocity.!!

So has you can see going high on Microstepping does have an impact on speed. But going to Low on micro stepping can affect how motors run and can make for very rough running motors. So typical micro stepping values range between 4x and 8x upto max 16x often 10x is used which gives 2000 micro steps like you orginally entered.

Motor tuning is a balance between Micro stepping, Velocity/acceleration, Pulse quality/frequency along with many factors like machine stiffness and resonance all playing some small part. This means each machine is slightly differant in how it's tuned so Motor tuning needs to be done with everything on the machine with each axis tweaked and setup individually. This is why you can't set motor tuning accurately on the bench as it will all change on the machine.

Know this is a lot to digest but take the time and it will all make much more sense.