Comment by waerhert
5 days ago
OnStepX is very much pulse based as far as I understand it. I haven't encountered offloading techniques like you mentioned yet. Since both motors support (multiturn) positon modes, it should be possible to completely forego the pulsebased approach and only drive the motors using regular (and less frequent in comparison to pulses) position instructions over CANBUS. I spent some time reading the code in OnStepX to understand how to implement it in this way but hooking it up in pulsemode was just too easy to get started.
> it should be possible to completely forego the pulsebased approach and only drive the motors using regular (and less frequent in comparison to pulses) position instructions
Since that capability is present, it's probably worth your while to apply it. Good motion control is hard, but important. Unnecessary vibration due to phase noise in the pulse train is an example of the subtleties that matter at high frequency. Excessive force generated when moving large masses can prematurely wear drive components and, over time, backlash increases and you get precision and repeatability problems. Well managed motion control will mitigate these things.