[Tazdingo]

Hi guys. I need a little help from someone who had experience with this stepper motors and this drivers. I plan to buy them from ebay and they are /- the same price and they offer the same performance but they are from different manufacturer who is better?

Nema 23, bipolar, open loop, 425oz wantai or longs (bouth of them have elephant logo ????)

dq542ma or dm542a what is better ?

[Jim Dawson]

They are proabaly made on the same assembly line.

If you want to start selling steppers & drives, order a container load of them and they will put Tazdingo on the cover, even with the Tasmanian Devil logo.

[rodw]

I'v had a good run out of the Longs Motor DM542A and a mate of mine has a CNC mill and lathe that uses them as well. We both love them. Stuff the Tassie Devil, go the Elephant every time!
But their breakout board reported as being is very slow.

[Tazdingo]

Thanks for your replay guys

I'v had a good run out of the Longs Motor DM542A and a mate of mine has a CNC mill and lathe that uses them as well. We both love them. Stuff the Tassie Devil, go the Elephant every time!
But their breakout board reported as being is very slow.

Yes they are coming with some "free" board but if i change it, if i buy some better you say the motors can have better performance?

[rodw]

I've never used a parallel port. I use mesa hardware with Linuxcnc. The parallel port is limited to about 20 kHz when my Mesa 7i76e can step at up to 10 MHz and it drives my DM542a's at about 90 kHz with 20x microstepping to give me 21 metres/min rapids.

I've been told that the opto isolators on the Longs Motor "free" supplied board are very slow so performance is not very good but the drivers themselves are good and very well priced.

Today if I was going to do something on a budget, I'd still use those drivers and probably pair them with a Mesa 7i96 ethernet card which are about $100. The Mesa 7i76e ethernet card I use is about $200 and has a lot more features for a similar price to a smooth stepper while offering significant performance benefits. It has 5 stepgens, 32 inputs, 16 outputs, 2 MPG inputs, 3-4 analog to digital inputs, encoder input, spindle interface.

But if it was a basic, small CNC machine, I'd give that board a go as it might do the job for you.