The East Coast RepRap Festival has just opened its gates - it’s people
from all over the world showing off what 3D-printing projects they’ve been working on,
what printers they’ve been building and you also get a chance to talk to some of the companies that
actually make the parts that people are using. And not just the big names that you all know,
but there are some that work kinda behind the scenes, and still end up being as important
if not more important than the ones that you have heard of. Who am I talking about? LDO.
It’s not going to be particularly interesting actually seeing me talk about stuff, so voiceover
Tom is doing this one, but I can have Jason from LDO motors give you a quick introduction:
They started out with high-quality stepper motors, but are now making everything from
printer mainboards to complete printer kits, and they’re sponsoring my trip to
ERRF and this very video, and I think we’re going to start out with their printer kits.
Now, LDO are actually supporting the developers of a whole bunch of open-source DIY 3D printers
with parts where they need them, be it, of course, Voron, but also Bear Lab, Railcore,
Annex Engineering, Jubilee, Hevort, the Positron or the Recreator 3D bottle-to-filament converter…
machine, and LDO are creating parts kits for some of these machines that you can use to build them.
I built my Voron 2.4 from a cheaper kit, and while it worked, from what people have been telling me,
the LDO kit actually makes for a much nicer building experience. LDO makes kits for the
tiny 0.1, the full-size 2.4, but also for the new Trident and the Switchwire. And because
they’re working closely with the developers, they know their kits are made according to
what the projects expect. They’re also working on producing kits for the foldable, upside-down
Positron v3 - that printer is a bit more involved if you want to source everything yourself, so a
kit is going to be super convenient, and a kit for the Recreator 3D is also in the works. Very nice.
Now if you’re thinking - I’ve heard of LDO before, but it’s not from printer kits, well,
you’ve right. They supply, of course, stepper motors for Prusa, as well as LCDs, mainboards,
heater PCBs for their machines, they make parts for E3D’s Hemera extruder, Formlabs
uses their stepper motors, and just generally, LDO are highly regarded as a quality supplier.
One of the components they’re showing off here at ERRF is one that I’m excited for,
because I think this could be the next big thing in 3D printers: A closed-loop stepper motor.
Basically, normal stepper motors don’t know what they’re doing, you just send them some electricity
and you hope they’ll spin the way you intend them to. The problem is what happens when they don’t,
when they lose a step or crash into the print or something else happens. Best case, you have
a Trinamic driver that detects that, and then the machine can rehome and continue printing, but that
process has its limitations. It takes time and it isn’t always 100% accurate. With these closed loop
steppers, the printer’s mainboard can keep track of what the motor is doing in real-time and it’ll
correct for any positional errors in real-time, too, without having to re-home. It’ll just make
up for any errors as it keeps on printing. So, effectively, you don’t have to over-spec stepper
motors as much anymore, because typically, you’d need to leave quite a lot of torque headroom that
just needs to be there “for eventualities” and typically is just being wasted. But
a closed-loop stepper can work reliably much closer to its limits, so can you push speeds and
accelerations much higher for the same size motor. Closed-loop solutions have been available for
a while, but since LDO worked with Duet3D to create a matching motor and encoder to
their 1HC expansion board, this is going to be a really clean and capable solution
with this high-torque, high-resolution stepper motor with an encoder in a small package,
matched to the specs of the Duet board. I hope I get to try it out at some point and if anything,
I hope that companies will start adopting these sort of “smart” systems in their machines as well.
Brain over brawn. I like that. Anyway, that’s been my look at
LDO motors from ERRF. Thanks again to LDO for sponsoring my trip there,
if you’re on the lookout for a new printer, keep an eye out for LDO
components, check out their kits, and if you make it to ERRF this year, say hello!
Thanks for watching, keep on making, and I’ll see you at ERRF, maybe!