Swap stepper motor driver for TMC2xxx

Installation

Various motor drivers can be used on the Trigorilla (8 bit) mainboard. Among others the TMC2100, TMC2208, TMC2225 and TMC2209. I strongly recommend branded products and the TMC2208 drivers from FYSETC*, MKS* or ERYONE*. TMC2225 are only TMC2208 in a different housing. TMC2209 have a few nice features that can only be used with UART and another board. They do work, but buying them would be wasted money. TMC2100 are the "old" ones. They work and are partly dirt cheap. They get a little hotter than the TMC2208, but do their job just as well.

I have had very bad experiences with BIGTREETECH/PoPprint, in which a driver of a package of 5 was often defective and short-circuited, so that the driver burned first and then the fuse on the board had to be replaced. In addition, these are often advertised as "V2" or "V3", which simply does not exist. The original versions of the TMC2208 SilentStepSticks are v1.0 (default Step/Dir version) or v1.2 (with UART support).

*The links marked with an asterisk are affiliate links. Nobody is forced to click on it and buy from it, but who does it makes Amazon reimburse me a few cents for advertising costs. You have no disadvantage from this and the articles are not more expensive or anything like that.

1. Open printer

At first glance, the printer is frightening, but since the Chinese only cook with water, the content is really manageable. At the top right we find the mainboard to which everything is connected. The one on the left is the power supply. We keep our hands off that.

2. Remove fan

The small fan that hangs above the board must first be removed so that we have a clear view of the (red) motor drivers.

3. Remove old A4899 motor drivers

The old drivers are relatively stuck on the board. However, they can be easily removed with wide pliers. It is important to keep them in the order in which they were inserted here!

4. Insert new drivers

Now the new drivers are plugged in. It is extremely important to pay attention to the polarity! It doesn't matter how the drivers look from above. The decisive factor is the assignment as can be seen in the photo. If you do it wrong, you will 100% roast the mainboard and the drivers.

5. Set reference voltage

Unfortunately, I don't have any photos for this yet, but basically you just have to hold a multimeter between any ground pin (GND) and the small rotary potentiometer (potentiometer) on the motor driver to measure the Vref. It is important that you measure while the printer is powered on.

The Vref should not fall below 1.0V, otherwise we will not have enough power on the axles. The extruder (E0) can also get 1.2V with the old Mega M extruder. The newer Titan Clone from the Mega S requires less and can also be driven with 1V.

A very good summary and instructions on how to calculate and measure the reference voltage can be found on the Watterrott website: https://learn.watterott.com/silentstepstick/faq/

Not only the drivers are highly recommended, but also the support.

In addition, user OHacks has extensively documented here which values Anycubic uses and how to use them transferred to motor drivers from Trinamic (e.g. TMC2208).

See: https://github.com/knutwurst/Marlin-2-0-x-Anycubic-i3-MEGA-S/issues/331

6. Install firmware

Since the motor outputs are wired the other way around with TMC drivers, the stepper motors would now run in the wrong direction. To prevent this from happening, we install the appropriate firmware for our printer from here, which Has _TMC in the file name. This indicates that the outputs of the motor drivers are already inverted.

7. THE END

If you still feel like it, you can replace the old fan with something quieter. I strongly advise against a printed wind tunnel (Fanduct), as this cannot work with axial fans and the air tends to accumulate in it. Instead, it has proven useful to simply place a quieter fan or two over the board.

Troubleshooting

This way