I think he's exaggerating for effect. Properly sized steppers have more than enough margin for rapid movement on hobby machines without losing steps ( Video example at 1000ipm: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1wSmXfnm6C/ ).

Skipped steps are only a problem if the machine is tuned wrong, like you said, or the steppers are too undersized to keep up.

People tend to underestimate the strength of common NEMA23 steppers while overestimating the cutting forces they need. Most hobby machines don't have enough rigidity or spindle power to require more than a few pounds of lateral cutting force.

To be precise, it's not the strength of the stepper, it's the gearing through the screw that converts the torque of the stepper into the force on the tool.

And that will give you slop which will translate into imprecise workpieces and surfaces that aren't flat.

At the hobby CNC level (what’s being discussed in this article), the rigidity of the machine is far more of an issue.

I think your advice is spot-on if someone was designing a 5000lb vertical mill out of steel, but hobbyists building DIY bench top machines face a different set of problems.

Hobby level machines are almost always limited by rigidity, not movement motor torque.

I've built a whole pile of CNC machinery, both lightweight and heavyweight. If you don't actually care about what you produce, fine, go with open loop steppers. If you want to control a device that produces accurate work products that do not need extensive rework (or to be tossed) then use something with a feedback mechanism.

I'm fine with you advocating for steppers for non-contact or drawing work (laser cutters, engraving and so on). But if you care about your tools, you don't want to wait for hours for what should be a small job then add the bit of money for a servo or a hybrid solution, on the total cost of the machine it won't make a lot of difference and the machine will be so much more reliable and faster that you'll end up using it much more frequently.

Right tool for the job and all that, bench top CNC with small servos is a very powerful tool in the hobbyists arsenal, and if you scrounge ebay you'll find they can be quite affordable. Note that anything that cuts has a stand-time, and if you move slower or make many passes because you can't really cut then you will end up spending a fortune in tooling which at some point will easily outweigh the price of the feedback mechanism, which automatically compensates for increased load and toolbit wear.

> I think he's exaggerating for effect.

I wasn't. You'll never make it through your first resonance point without current feedback, and a good stepper driver can easily go into very large multiples of that frequency.

Then there is microstepping.

> Most hobby machines don't have enough rigidity or spindle power to require more than a few pounds of lateral cutting force.

This is true, but a different problem.

I think you’re approaching this discussion from a commercial/industrial scale.

Hobbyist CNC machines simply don’t have the same issues as large commercial-grade CNC mills. None of the popular hobby CNCs use closed loop motor control. Skipped steps are simply not an issue at this scale.

I long had dimensional accuracy issue that the whole axes seemed to stretch and contract like 5%, on a cartesian 3D printer, and it just went away after I switched to Servo42B setup.

I think it’s microstepping. Steppers with microstepping enabled and controlled by an 8-but micro must be assumed to produce zero holding torque and assumed they always miss a step or two.

Upgrade the controller. For a hobbyist machine, the ESP32 CNC controller sold on Tindie is well suited to deal with that, and costs ~$35.

I made a PCB for an ESP32 CNC controller, if anyone finds it useful:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc

Nice! I'll check it out! Here's a link to the one I'm using:

https://www.tindie.com/products/33366583/grbl_esp32-cnc-deve...

The developer is really responsive, might be worth collaborating since you have put in similar work.

I'm running one of these on my Lowrider 2 and it's pretty great. The only real issue I've had was with limit switches (I got cocky and didn't use shielded cables, then ran the sensor cables with the stepper ones, so I had to add pull-ups and filtering caps to smooth out the noise... lesson learned!) The web interface does seem to crash semi-regularly if you step off the straight and narrow but once you know the pitfalls it's great to be able to drive your router around with a laptop or phone, and to be able to upload files over wifi.

There are several newer boards from Bart (including the 6-pack which has some add on modules).

Grbl ESP32 is great. Easily the best of the firmwares I've used so far.

I've been interested in upgrading to his newer boards, but I'm not sure I want the added complexity at the moment. Have you used the generic modular one? If so, how does it compare to the older one I linked to?

Interesting question; I just had to go through this myself. I really only wanted 3 axes and considered the older one you linked to (which isn't marked 'retired', but is "out of stock"). The first thing I'd mention is that the older board doesn't support the new style of drivers (old = TI DRV8825, new = Trinamic SPI). SPI drivers are much nicer for a number of reasons, in particular you can change the motor current via software, and with the trinamics there's support for stallguard.

In my case I'm not building a CNC, but controlling the axes of a microscope (X, Y, Z) plus the intensity of the illuminator and likely several other things, so the 6-pack (which I also use on my CNC) had what I wanted.

Oh, you can also use either onboard or external motor drivers with the 6-pack- external motor drivers are good for NEMA23 and other large motors.

I've heard so many good things about Trinamic drivers, but never had a good opportunity to use them! I'll be fixing up a friend's 3018 generic soon, might be a good time to give them a try. Changing current on the fly is a killer feature!

Nice, we use CNC microscopes at work for automated feature dimension measurements, they're incredibly useful for validating milled parts and inspecting wear patterns over time.

Thanks for the info, I'm going to have to upgrade again soon it sounds like!

TBH, I haven't dived into the stall detection in Trinamics, but the goal is to eliminate end stops on my scope.

Microstepping does not reduce torque in any respect.