cooling pololu steppers

So i've got my electronics kit i still need to assemble, but I read somewhere that I would need to cool my pololu stepper drivers.

Can you guys recommend something ?

Best Regards,

Evert

A small fan works.

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My Pololu's with Gen 3 electronics are not cooled but they are out in the open. No overheating problems at all. I intend to mount a fan in the RAMPS case once I change the electronics over.

I meant to write not cooled by a fan. But they do have heatsinks stuck on them.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2011 08:59PM by brnrd.

I think I'm going to become "that nut" that preaches about drivers not overheating.

If your stepper motors are strong enough, and you bushings are smooth, you should not have to turn up the current very high on your Pololu driver modules. The end result is that they run perfectly fine without heat sinks. If your X,Y, and Z motors are getting hot at all, you need to turn down the current.

If the extruder motor is getting hot, it depends how hot. Warm to moderately hot is good so long as it can push plastic at normal speeds. At higher speeds, the extruder motor should periodically release (gears should turn back rapidly) due to filament tension. If your current is set so high that your extruder does not release when stressed, it may push out your nozzle, or warp the extruder body.

All this being said, passive and active cooling can only help. If you are on a budget, you can flatten out short lengths of copper wire, bend them into a U shape, and glue them to the top of the chips with cyanoacrylate (AKA Krazy Glue).

If you have copper or aluminum tape around, you can make heat sinks out of that, but it's not economical compare to just getting tiny heatsinks, unless you are going to make some for all your friends.

For what it's worth, I have a RAMPS setup on a Prusa Mendel, and the potentiometers on the pololu drivers are turned to about a third. During testing of the motors without any cooling mechanism the drivers were getting pretty hot, i.e. untouchable, and on a few occasions they shutdown, I presume from overheating.

After reading around I decided to get some heat sinks from grrf. To date everything is running nice and cool (touch wood!) and I haven't noticed any heating problems on the drivers, nor the motors.

If money is tight then I would take jcaber's advice and test without heat sinks and see how that goes, but if not then some small heat sinks does the trick.

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thx for the info, i've ordered some heat sinks just to be sure