I am considering SimpleFoc in a CoreXY printer for the X and Y motors. The current setup is Wentai steppers with a max current of 2.5A being driven by TMC5160s @ 48V.
I was wondering if SimpleFoc might be able to get more out of the steppers than the TMC5160s or at least reduce the noise.
Also I would like to know if SimpleFOC suffers from cogging at low speeds like the ODrive does.
My second use case would be for a remote direct drive extruder utilising a flexshaft similar to the Zesty Nimble or Flex3Drive. So I would need a motor with very low rotor inertia, that can spin at about 4500 RPM with very low torque of only around 0.01Nm. The small Maxxon motors which are long and small in diameter look promising. But they are mostly DC motors. Probably a really small BLDC motor might work too.
An alternative would be running a round Nema14 stepper from SimpleFOC.
The main question though is if performance can be increased by using a dynamic control approach that can increase current in contrast to a stepper driver that only does constant current.
@runger is right, I also try FOC with steppers. Unfortunately there is almost no interest in that, despite steppers would benefit a lot. Maybe it comes from the big 4-5bit penalty on encoder resolution.
One week after posting the finding above I found no other solution than having an insanely expensive 16 or 18 bit encoder to get the accuracy I need.
What are your Core XY printer requirements in terms of position accuracy?
I assume you have no encoder today and thus operate with microstepping.
I am running a 20T pulley on my steppers. So one revolution gives me 40mm of travel. Given 200 steps per revolution would yield 0.2mm per step. If I can get that down to 0.05mm that would be fine.
