Support for NEMA motors

[Kepete]

Thanks for the work! Sadly the 28BJY-48 Stepper motor is very low torque and for a little bigger blinds doesn't work anymore. Have you thought about making this plugin work with a more powerful stepper like NEMA 17 for example? It would need a powerful driver also, maybe drv8825 or even TB6600.

[maxmacstn]

Hi, I have ordered nema 17 motors for this project. If I have enough free time, new version might be finished in 2 months.

[Kepete]

Thats awesome. I tried some time back but never got in working correctly.

What driver are you going to use for the NEMA? Did you went with a regular NEMA or one with a gear box for more torque? Thought, there shouldn't be much of a differences from software and driver side.

Anyways, I will be waiting for that release 👍

[maxmacstn]

I bought the regular NEMA without gear + A4988 Driver.

My concern is this motor has very low resistance when no power, that will cause the blinds to fall down due to the gravity and no braking on the blind's shaft. But if I apply the current to hold the motor all the time, it'll get very hot and eventually burnt.

so currently, I have no idea how to solve this, it might need to redesign the mount with the gearbox. But that isn’t gonna happened very soon.

[Kepete]

I came across the same concern you have. The solution I found was NEMA with gearbox. It has first of all more torque, but without power applied has also way more resistance.

Have you already developed the code support for NEMA + A4988 Driver? If you could share this I would also look into if the NEMA gearbox resistance is enough or more exactly for how big blinds it is enough.