Ribbon Cables for wiring

Hi,
I want to use Ribbon cable for wiring for my new 3d printer so what is the standard that I need to follow?
Is there any preferred AWG(American Wire Gauge) value should i need to use for connecting stepper motors and heat bed (as heat bed requires more current) to the controller board?
How the ribbon cables can be differed as per AWG wise for both heat bed and stepper motors?


Thank you in Advance

You should really use twisted shielded pair to wire stepper motors and limit switches.
22-18 gauge should be fine

The twisted pair minimizes external effects of high frequency voltage out to motors.

There are instances of motor wires triggering end stops

Extruder heater and bed heater should have gauge wire to handle the high current --- 12 -- 14 gauge stranded wire

Quote
cozmicray
You should really use twisted shielded pair to wire stepper motors and limit switches.
22-18 gauge should be fine

The twisted pair minimizes external effects of high frequency voltage out to motors.

There are instances of motor wires triggering end stops

Extruder heater and bed heater should have gauge wire to handle the high current --- 12 -- 14 gauge stranded wire

Hi,
what you have told for wiring the motors is correct, but recently i have seen "Bukito 3D Printer" in which for the latest model complete wiring is done by ribbon cable only so because of that I'm thinking why we cant use ribbon cables?
For ribbon cables 24 AWG or 26 AWG are in my mind to use. And i have little doubt about heat bed wiring using ribbon cable.

Ribbon cable should be OK for the stepper motors. The important things are to make sure that each phase of the motor uses two adjacent conductors in the cable, and the conductors are thick enough to carry the motor current. The usual grey ribbon cable with 1.27mm spacing between conductors is probably too thin to carry the motor current, but the thicker (usually multicoloured) cable with 2.54mm conductor spacing should be OK. Don't put endstop and motor wires in the same ribbon cable.

The RepRapPro Ormerod 1 used 26-conductor 1.27mm grey ribbon cable for the heated bed. Two conductors were used for the thermistor, and 12 each to carry the current to/from each terminal of the 10A bed heater. It worked well, and it was only changed in the Ormerod 2 because RepRapPro needed to use shielded cable to meet CE emissions limits.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].