 DigiKey presents. And Ada, bring you, it's now time for IonMPI. That's right. And this one is for all the people who are doing CNC builds. We're like, how come you don't cover any motor drivers on IonMPI? Well, today we're gonna take a step in the right direction. Yeah. With these stepper drivers. And we're gonna keep with the pyramid theme. That's right. Which company is this and what do they make? This is Trinamic. And they're a German motor control company that they make really high quality stepper motor drivers. And one of the things they're kind of famous for is their stepper drivers are really silent. They figured out a way to microstep motor so you don't get that annoying squeak that most people are used to with stepper motors and we'll show off a demo. So the chip today, the chip today is the Trinamic TMC 2226. Just came out and it's an HT SOP shaped, the 28 pin stepper motor driver. It drives one stepper motor. What's really cool is it can drive a stepper motor at 2.4 amp peak, 2 amp RMS continuous, which is more than the previous models and more than most stepper drivers. So if you wanted to upgrade your CNC build to handle a little bit more current, this is your motor driver. Okay. So first thing, if you open the data sheet, they've got this awesome logo. It's like a stepper motor but as a speaker and then a big no sign. No, no, no making noise. This is the big thing. The big thing is that they're called like silent steppers. So this is what they're they're good at and it's, you know, people often upgrade their lower cost or not as high quality stepper motor drivers choose Trinamic drivers because like CNC machines and 3D printers can be have pretty noisy stepper drivers if they're not running this silent technology. Okay. So stepper drivers, you know, as James actually was researching stepper drivers and they, you know, this is all the pins on the chip. There's a lot of power and ground pins. There's 28 pins. It looks a little scary, but it's not so bad. And there's basically three ways to drive it. And the first one is the simplest kind of the legacy style where you give it power and ground, give a couple capacitors. And then there's two pins that set the microstepping so you can set it to be like, I think one eighth, one sixteenth. Let me look it up because I want to make sure I get this right. Yeah, one eighth microstepping, one sixteenth, one thirty-second, one sixty-fourth. So you can do that just by setting these two pins, which are labeled here MS1, MS2. And then you have step and durr. And when, you know, durr is high, the stepper always goes in one direction and then you drop pin, the durr pin low, it goes in the other direction. And then every time the step pin toggles, the stepper and motor steps in one direction. So it's very simple. It can be driven by any micro computer, you know, micro controller. It's extremely easy. You can use three or five volt logic. And then the motor, you give it, I think, up to like thirty-six volts. Okay, so that's like the simplest way. But there's also this like other kind of interesting way to drive it. So up top you see there's the SD step direction and then the stepper motor and you just need some sensor sisters. But they also have a UART interface, which is kind of interesting because it lets you control up to four of these TMC steppers in a more advanced fashion by sending it like these like CNC, sorry, CRC UART packets. And it uses a one bi-directional, so like half duplex UART. You know, you can actually also tell it when it's like, okay, some of the, you don't want to get started quickly, you can download these chi-cat files. And it's rare. Usually you get like a PDF, or maybe you'll get like Orcat or Altium. They usually don't use an open source tool. But I think makers will really like this. If you, you know, use chi-cat, it's open source schematic capture and layout software. So you can see here, this is a pretty easy board to put together. And I have a demo, maybe I thought we'd Yeah, we have a demo and we have a video. So let's look at the demo and then we'll play a video. Yeah, so I thought I'd show the chip and then I'll show the demo. So I got some of these chips. So the secret of this package is it's got this huge ground plane on the bottom here that's used for heat sinking. So on my prototype, you know, I don't have a pad on that. So I can't overdrive this motor. But that's what lets you do that, you know, high current 2.4 amp peak per coil winding. But it's not a very big chip. It's easy to pick in place. You can even hand solder it. So this morning I soldered it onto one of our TSOP 28 breakouts. And I have it hooked up here to just a metro. And this is that step direction interface. So I have pin three connected to direction and pin two connected to step and I'm just having it toggles. Let me turn it on. And you can see this is just smoothly turning this stepper motor is really easy to get started. And it's really, really quiet. This is doing I think one eighth microstepping and like, you can't hear it at all. Super quiet. So this I think would be a great upgrade to a 3D printer project, or a CNC, you know, robot, or, you know, a drawing robot, anything that uses stepper motors, especially when you need a lot of torque, you need a lot of current. And the price is the same as other stepper drives about $1, $50, $60 in quantity from Digikey. Okay, and let's play a little bit of video. So it's a couple minutes. We'll see you on the other side and tell you where to get on Digikey. Okay. Spread cycle is Trinamix Advanced Chopper mode that gives you best performance in smoothest motor operation with every step of your target current sine wave form, especially during zero crossing. This is done by Trinamix patented mixed decay mode where every fast decay phase gets adapted with every chopper cycle. Stairs Chop is Trinamix new patented one of its kind voltage controlled mode, which enables absolute quiet stepper motor control in low and medium velocity ranges with maximum torque. On top of that, the movement of the motors even more smooth than with spread cycle and a micro step resolution of 256 to give best performance at any velocity Trinamix stealth shop drivers allow automatic switching between stealth shop and spread cycle. This is done by setting a velocity threshold in one of its registers. The difference here is that current controlled chopper modes like spread cycle always reacts to the coil current measurement in a cycle by cycle base. This results in the typical stepper motor noise or even hissing or chirping. Stealth shop is using a fixed frequency which leads to absolute quiet stepper motor operation. Stealth shop is driving a clean sine wave current into the motor coils without adapting the frequency every chopper cycle. This leads to less current ripple and an incredible smooth run of the motor. The first time I saw stealth shop in the development, I couldn't believe that this actually is a stepper motor. You see on the tablet four different micro step resolutions are used for this video. Full step common 16 times micro stepping for many companies still state of the art spread cycle with 256 micro steps and stealth shop. I will go through each mode on the tablet now. Starting with full stepping and the velocity of around 100 rpm, you clearly hear the audible noise switching to 16 times micro stepping already reduces the noise a lot. Switching to 256 micro steps and Trinamix spread cycle technology reduces audible noise dramatically and makes the movement much smoother switching to stealth shop makes the movement even smoother and the motor is completely silent. We can increase the velocity here to around 300, but that's not the limit. Okay, and here's where to get it on Digikey and as always, we have the product. I'm sure your ID and the short URL. Yep. So they look like they got a couple reels of this and I bought like the first five like this was a this is a super hot new product. I mean, this was just put in this Digikey shop like two or three days ago. But I know people who are always looking for the next big upgrade for their CNC project. So I thought I would get this out there. You can pick up the chips at Digikey is just search for TMC 2226 or go to that short URL and check it out. And then of course, download the CAD CAD files so you can get started immediately on upgrading your CNC bot. That's I am MPI this week.