Today we're going to talk about how to install the TMC2208 on the MakerBase MKS
Robin Nano version 2.0, okay like always before we start we have to look at the
underside of the MKS Robin Nano version 2.0 and as you can see in the upper left hand side
there's something that says uart mode that is actually the jumper setting where it's
solid for a square that's white we also have spy mode which shows you that it's all the
squares that are covered and then of course we have our step dur mode that's on the far right
on top and you can see the squares that are used for that for jumpers okay now that we know where
to actually place the jumper for the TMC2208 I'm going to show you how to do this real quick
so we need to find the actual marked off square that we found in our previous configuration so
I need to place this correctly so I'm going to slide this in and as you can see that's
the position that we want so we're going to push down now we're going to do the y-axis
and we're going to push down now we're also going to set up a step dur configuration so
you can see the contrast so i'm going to put a jumper right here
take another jumper
and place it right here and then finally take one last jumper
and place it here so for the UART mode I do need to point out a couple of
landmarks for how to connect your actual stepper chip so what i'm going to do is
I'm going to point out where the enable pin is first of all so if you're looking at the
board in the bottom right hand corner you're going to see the enable pin right over here
it's got an N in front of it because apparently the E is not there and then at the other end
we have the DIR pin it's located right here and up here we have the ground pin
those are the landmarks that you need to know when you flip your board over so here's a blown up
image of the TMC2208 version 2.0 for the MKS as you can see in the bottom left hand corner there's
a pin called enable written on the silk screen and on the far right underneath the multiple of 10 for
focus you can see there is a DIR and then in the upper right hand corner you can see the ground pin
those are going to be landmarks that we're going to use to install this I also want to show you
that the actual trim pod is in the upper left hand corner and that's used to actually adjust
current but with these we adjust current with software so we're not going to touch this
okay to install the actual physical driver now the stepper we know that the enable is in the upper or
excuse me bottom left hand corner and we also know that the enable pin after flipping over the board
and looking is located right here here here here and here for our x stepper our y stepper our z
stepper our E0 stepper and our E1 stepper so to install it all we have to do is verify
where the enable pin is and then place it over the spot where it needs to be and apply
a little bit of pressure now we're going to do the same thing with the second one
and then finally we want to install our DRV8825 so we have to flip it over to check
where the enable pin is located and then we're going to install that
right here
now if you haven't noticed already I haven't installed the cooling fins yet we're not actually
going to be doing a lot of printing with this i'm just showing you the test but when you do print
please have your cooling fins on top to wick away the heat and also a fan running to keep them cool
but for now we're going to load the actual firmware so we need to pop out the 128 megabit
drive and place it inside our adapter so we can place this in our computer
so that we can now program
okay the first thing that i want to start with like I always do is to show you the SD card and on
it we have Robin underscore Nano 35 dot cur that means that it's the current file that was recently
last loaded her is current so I'm going to go over to VScode and I'm going to click on explorer
then open folder and I'm going to go to my downloads folder where my Marlin is and it's
extracted and unzipped and I'm going to close one level deep and two levels deep then I'm going to
say select folder inside here I'm going to click on the Marlin folder then the source folder
then the core folder then boards.h inside here I'm going to search for
board underscore MKS underscore Robin underscore Nano underscore v2 because that's the board
that we're looking for and I'm going to copy that then I'm going to close out of boards.h
and I'm going to minimize the folders for
source and I'm going to go over to configuration.h and search on motherboard
and inside here i'm going to highlight the ramps configuration and paste our change over it
then I'm going to scroll up here and I'm going to change the serial port to 3
now I need to change the stepper driver so I'm going to search on A4988
and I'm going to remove the comments for the x
the y
the z and E0
these are the steppers that we normally would use and E0 is our first extruder now we need to change
the A4988 to the actual stepper that we're going to be working with so it's a TMC2208 I'm going
to highlight that copy it paste it for our x and our y now we're using a different stepper being
the DRV8825 for our zed so I'm going to copy that and I'm going to paste that right here now these
may have opposite directions there's an invert function that you can use so you can say invert
and down here you can actually change the direction of your stepper to solve
the problem if it's going the wrong direction the other fix is to take your dupont connector
and reverse it 180 degrees to reverse your direction as well
so now that we have that figured out I'm gonna go back to the A4988 for a second
and I'm going to scroll down here this is where we actually set our steps per millimeter so the A4988
is defaulted to 1/16 of a step but the TMC2208 has the functionality to go from 1/16 of a step
all the way up to 256 of a step but we're probably not going to do that I'm going to keep it close to
1/16 but I'm going to show you how to figure out if in the future you want to change it
this may or may not work depending upon your configuration but if you go over to reprap
calculator you can see that right here if we were to set this to 1/16 of a step it's defaulted to
200 but if we go to 132nd it goes to 400 so if you were to go to 1/64th it would be 800.
I don't suggest doing this initially until you understand how it operates
but that's one of the ways to figure out what your steps may be so we're going to leave it at
basically 400 to start for both our steppers this would be 1/32nd of a step
but even that seems a little high so maybe we'll do 200 and do 1/16.
and then the last one would be our z axis and reprap calculator you can do that as well now this
defaults to a lead screw driven system so that means that 1/16 of a step is going to be 2500 2560
but if we do 1/32nd which is the DRV8825 it changes we're going to copy that and we're
going to assume that our lead screw is an M8 and that our stepper is 1.8 degrees of step
so I'm gonna paste that right here so these are approximations that you can learn to calibrate
and I have a calibration video that you can watch on how to do that but for now we're
going to skip that I'll just leave a link in the upper right hand corner on how to do
the extruder for calibration and then the principle is almost the same
so now that we have that set we're gonna have to go to the configuration advanced.h
and we need to search on 800 to get us in the neighborhood of where the actual steppers are
so here we are these are for Trinamic steppers which are the TMC2208s and the default value
is 800 so i'm going to change that to 750 just because that's the way I like to do it but if
you want to compute the exact measurement you can go over to here and do the computation for root
mean square which is rms but you have to depend on your data sheets to understand what you're
doing for this calculation and that would include the TMC2208 and the NEMA17 steppers that you're
probably using then there's other calculations that you can do for micro stepping like if you
want to double it here you could probably do 32 but we're going to stick with 16 for the moment
we're going to do that for the x stepper and I'm also going to do that for the y
stepper I'm going to change it to 750. the next thing that we need to do is enable debugging so
we can see what's going on in case something is broken so i'm going to search first on
monitor
and what it has here is a debug statement for monitor driver status so I'm going to remove
the comment to enable it and this will allow us to monitor what's going on and give us debugging
tools like the M122 so now that we have that enabled we need to enable TMC underscore debug
and enable that as well so we're going to search on that and it's right down here I'm going to
remove the comment so that that is enabled and then there's other functionality that I'm not
going to go into just yet but there's a hybrid mode that you can actually enable right here this
is hybrid threshold you can read about it on your own and figure out how it operates but right now
I'm going to leave it commented out because I just want to get you up and running with your steppers
so the next thing that we need to set up is actually our platformio.ini and right now
the default environment is set for a MEGA2560 chipset so we need to change that to the actual
chipset that we're working with so what we're going to do is we're going to search on robin
and this will bring us down to where our stepper may be located in this case it's the mks
Robin underscore Nano 35 so we're going to copy that then we're going to go back up to our default
environment highlight the MEGA2560 and paste over it so all we need to do now is actually set this
up to compile so I like to do a clean which is the little garbage can down here to clean things out
and then I'm going to click on the check box which is actually the build box but this is also known
as compile so I'm going to click on that and let it compile for a moment so that it sets up our
build okay now that it's completed compiling we can see that it's successful to load this what we
need to do is click on the dot pio folder then go to the build folder then go to MKS Robin Nano 35
right click on that and then go to reveal and explore then click on the actual folder
and down at the bottom we actually have our build which is the Robin underscore Nano 32
dot bin so we're going to right click on that and we're going to do send to and we're going
to send it to our sd card then we can click on our sd card and as you can see we now have our
build which is the binary right here I'm going to remove this and place it inside the MKS Robin Nano
version 2 to see what happens okay to set this up I'm going to remove the actual drive and place it
inside the Robin Nano like so next thing that we need to do is actually wire this
up so it needs direct power you can do it on USB but I don't suggest it
so what I'm going to do is take these two ferrule connections
that go to my power supply and I'm going to insert them in here so this is currently powered down
so it should be safe so I'm going to place these in here
notice how I've marked the red for voltage
and I have the black as well
so now that those are inserted what I'm going to do is actually tighten them down
so now that those are nice and secure we can actually power up our system I'm going to take
this I'm going to insert it into the actual wall socket but before I do that let me point
out where the jumper positions are because they're on direct power so this should load our firmware
so it is now energized so you don't want to touch your board
so I'm going to insert this so I actually can connect to it and then in a moment I'll set
up the actual test for the steppers so off camera I actually connected up some motors
so that we can test this so I'm going to open up Pronterface I'm then going to connect to
the actual device and as you can see it says connecting and now printer is online so I want
to test the two steppers that we have enabled so I'm going to type M122 and see if they're okay
so according to this it says the x and the y are okay and the debug is running over here
so what i want to do next is actually move the x-axis 10 millimeters I'm going to try
the y-axis for 10 millimeters now they're moving in opposite directions that may be
due to the actual inversion for the x and y are different like I showed you in Marlin
but you can always match those up and then let's test the z driver for 10 millimeter
notice how it moves a lot more that has to do with the setting where I did steps per
millimeter in the Marlin firmware
so if you like my tutorial please press the like button and subscribe and for those that don't know
the board was actually provided to me by maker base for this tutorial so I will be placing
amazon affiliate links in the description so that you can find some of these components