Building a USB PD Powered Stepper Driver (PD Stepper) 

I went through the same thought process haha!

same here ahah

Oh hey Brian fancy seing you here haha

Same thoughts here too. Got the same geared motor here already and was thinking about a use case. Think I found one. 🙂

put liion charge controller on the same board with boost to make it wireless.

That pun is fire

he sticked a magnet at the end of motor shaft, what is the use of it?

​@@ray-charc3131He using magnetic encoder ic to know motor postion

@@ray-charc3131 He is using a magnetometer or hall effect sensor to measure the magnetic field. With that he is able to check the current rotation of the shaft of the motor.

It a diamagnetic encoder Hyhpsjiee 6pcs AS5600 Magnetic... www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS1LCSR8?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Would add too much delay which will ruin a print. Maybe communicating through the usb protocol might work? But not sure

@@hexidev The board lacks a realtime clock to work, but sync over network is still feasible I think. Couldn't you feed the gcode in pieces (buffered) kind of like video streaming works? The gcode then must have wait markers which makes the ESPs ask before they continue. I know this is absolutely not realtime per definition, but with some checks in place I think it could still control the printer

@@hexidev Every printer running Klipper firmware works this way. You can have as many microcontroller boards you want connected to a Raspberry Pi host. Being an ESP-32, this would probably be pretty easy to set up too. The microcontrollers run a real-time OS that's synchronized with the host. The host sends a stream of commands of what to do and when and they all dance together nicely. :) The most common connection method in Klipper is most likely USB, but it can work over many different connections and protocols, with the more advanced systems using CAN-bus.

​@glabifrons or even a thin client or laptop running a Debian linux. This stuff is so kool!!

You just proposing moving stepper drivers from one neatly designed place to at least five places that are hotter and harder to cool down. And on top of that adding weight to places where every gram matters.

Thanks for the suggestions, would definitely be a squeeze to fit it on the top side it is pretty crowded as is haha. Also a spacer or something would still be required as you would risk shorting out the tracks/vias mounting it directly onto the motor

@@ThingsbyJosh Yeah it would be a tight fit indeed. In order to get rid of the spacer problem you could use a 4 (or 6) layer pcb with no tracks on the bottom. I'm guessing 4 (or 6) layers would still be cheaper than machining a spacer, and you could probably save some additional space on the top of the board.

@@nikscha It is currently a 4 layer board and going to 6 means I would be able to remove tracks from the bottom layer however it also uses PTH vias which could still short out on the metal. Blind vias could solve this or a layer of insulating heat pad or something. Something to think about for the future

@@ThingsbyJosh good points. I'm really on the fence of buying a board. I like the idea a lot and I want to support you, but I also don't have an application for the board at all. Do you have any smart home related suggestions?

​@@nikscha A few ones people have mentioned are blinds, pet feeder, cupboard door for robot vacuum and a TV lift

Then get to work😅

What’s a POE?

@@electricburning Power Over Ethernet, its like ethernet with a power cable

@@dromerdev Thanks!!! I’d like to see a POE version too

@@electricburning Welcome :) 🤗

Full schematic is on the project GitHub if you want to check it out. This is just a PD sink so no switching FETs are required for the PD on this board. The TPS25751 does look nice for a PD though

ive been outjoshed homie ICANT

There are solder pads on the back for a thermistor input meant for sensing motor temperature which could be repurposed

@@ThingsbyJosh WOW. perfect! Now i just need to steal a few watts for the heater and i have a perfect 3d printer toolhead control board. Wheat is your USB PD voltage? 24V?

It is software or hardware configurable for either 5V, 9V, 12V, 15V or 20V. There are also some pads underneath where you can directly access it, although I would be careful about drawing too much current running a heater off of it. Technically you can draw upto 100W but I would definitely not want to do this continuously.

It does! There is a 3 pin AUX connector that has two GPIO's and a GND reference

You can probably code a library for that, I'm asuming the creator wont implement that but I'm sure some tech savvy person can/will create it.

Yes this should be doable using the stall guard feature on the TMC2209 driver

Thanks! The foam is cut out and engraved using a diode laser on a CNC machine

ahh I see, thank you for the info and I wish you great luck on this venture my friend :)

Do not have to manually put it into bootloader mode every time, just for the first upload. Although I have found with the Arduino IDE when/if you call Serial.begin() can affect its ability to automatically enter bootloader mode.

I can add them to the GitHub if you would like. However the mount is very specialized to my setup as it is using an existing mounting hole in the wall previously used as a guide for the chain.

@@ThingsbyJosh It would be nice to see the chain drive if you can add that.

Looks like New Zealand

Yes New Zealand

Link is in the description

Thanks, for the pre-orders/production certain parts are being outsourced such as the PCB being assembled by a fab house.

Depending on what you use to control each unit you may have slight synchronisation issues between axis. The ESP32-S3 is pretty fast so it may not be noticable not 100% sure without trying

Assembling after designing, yes. That's what building is.

@@clonkex sure, I just expected this video to include the design process as well. this title is annoying because it's not even trying for shock value as in clickbait, it straight-up just implies something that is not there

Me too!

This doesn't have to be mounted on the back of a motor if you don't care about position sensing. Could just 3D print a case for it and use it with a Nema 8

The motor on the right is not being driven, the encoder on the rear is just being used to detect the current position and sent it wirelessly to the other motor

It's a custom one I designed it myself, probably most similar to the Cindymill

It is a webserver running on the PD Stepper so no app needed. And the source code is on GitHub

The partial kit should be at a lower price which is what I am seeing

@@ThingsbyJosh I guess it's just ios being ios.

Link is in the description!

Yes it is a diametrically magnetized magnet used for detecting the angle of the shaft

I'm obviously a bit biased because I designed it but I think there are lots of cases where people want to move something a set amount and this allows for that in one simple board. There are many ways to control this board (WiFi, step/dir, USB, i2c, serial, etc) and for example GRBL which some of the most popular software for stepper motor control uses serial over USB for it's primary input. The sensor/actor example was more an example of wireless communication between devices using ESPNow rather than a precise motion control system. Also for if you really need super fast and precise movements a servo motor is better than a stepper anyway.

​@@ThingsbyJoshIf you designed it, there must have been a reason. I see a lot of cool applications for this.

Are there a ton of people needing all you describe with a $10 nema 17 motor? They almost exclusively seem to be used with usb in some way, 3d printers, small cnc machines, laser cutters, etc. Have you designed a similar board that has lower latency or realtime capabilities?

@@ThingsbyJosh Thanks for showing this off. Have you done any type of testing to see what happens with four or six of these boards using espnow and all linked to a master esp32 for control? I haven't even learned how to connect two boards together at this point.

​@@orangezeroalpha Haven't personally used more than a couple at a time but should be pretty easy to do. ESPNow supports direct pairing upto 20 devices and broadcasting to an "unlimted" number of boards