Today I'm going to talk about how to break the output for the NEMA 17
steppers into two steppers from one stepper driver board in order to do that
I just purchased a small little product here that'll divide it into two so
there's one input that goes to the one input of the axis that you want to break
into and then it gives you two outputs for each one of your steppers
in a moment I'll give you a closer look at this and how to set it up okay to set
it up it's really simple we have a notched cable so we're just gonna plug
it in is if we were plugging in a regular stepper and then we're gonna
plug it in the axis of her choice in this case we're gonna use the y axis but
it obviously can be used for either the X or the Z as well so that's why you
have to do to set it up and then what you're gonna do is take your input for
your NEMA plug it in on the one side and then plug it in for the other in a
moment I'll show you how to connect the USB and then connect to the computer
okay we need to connect the USB serial cable in order to load the firmware so
the begin goes in the board like so the small line goes into the computer and
you're gonna hear a beep now keep in mind you can't touch this area once it's
been energised by the power from the USB so in a moment I'm gonna show you how to
load the Marlin firmware okay the first thing we're gonna do is open up the
marlin folder for 1.1.8 we're then going to open up the Marlin sub folder we're
gonna press, 'M', on the keyboard and scroll down to, "Marlin.ino", and hit enter
inside the Marlin folder we're gonna go to, "configuration.h", we're gonna
search on, "motherboard"
and what we have here is motherboard we have the, "BOARD_RAMPS_14_EFB",
now the architecture for the MKS Gen L and
the RAMPS 1.4 are exactly the same so we're gonna leave that alone so now
we're gonna search on, "DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT",
And what we have here is the breakout of the X Y and Z and then
of course we have extruders and additional extruders if you so choose
but in this case we're not concerned with changing anything because this is
just to show the device that we've connected so I'm going to show you how
to load the firmware instead so first we're gonna go to tools we're gonna go
to the COM port make sure it's selected which it appears to be and then we're
gonna go over to the compile and upload button over here and let it upload in a
moment I'll show you in Pronterface and on the MKS Gen L how the dual stepper
actually works
okay off-camera I attached the 12-volt power supply it's not plugged in
obviously and I also unplug the five volt to do it so I'm gonna plug it back
in for the five volts for USB remember you can't touch this area once there's
power running through it that includes five volts and the 12 volt power supply
so now I'm plugging in the power supply it's energized so this is unsafe to
touch in a moment I'll show you how the steppers work and pronterface okay what
we're gonna do is we're gonna open up Pronterface we're gonna connect to the
actual 3d printer board now I'm gonna move the axis by 10 and show you what
happens now I'm gonna move the axis by 100 so you can see what happens again
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