Mine is bigger than yours

Finally got my new big stepper motor. It was bigger than I had realized and took some effort to mount to my system.

Then I learned to drive it. Turns out my greatest enemy is inertia. What I've built is just so damn heavy and massive I can't just start off the motor at full speed. Being a half-assed physicist I should know that already. But I guess experience is also needed.

So to get the motor running properly - careful speedup, slowdown and backslash delay at return need to be coded. Actually. I'm making this all up as I go, don't have any formal education and doing inertia calculations seems like a pain. So I try and see what works.

But basically I need to reduce weight. All that steel and heavy aluminium beams I'm moving along take a lot of effort. And cause excessive shaking of the whole machine resulting in some jitter at the printed page. Also the HP printer carriage is designed to slant forwards and backwards at different stages of the rail. The movement of the whole assembly though causes it to shake at the wrong places, more distorting the printed page.

However. It's not all that bad. Please enjoy my latest print:

The page is starting to look pretty nice: