Continuing the series on stepper motor driver upgrades for your 3D printer, comes another highly requested video: a complete guide to the TMC2208.

Like the TMC2100, this driver offers very quiet operation with stealthchop2. It can be used in legacy mode as a drop in replacement, or configured using one time programming to be in spreadcycle. The best option is to connect it to your mainboard via UART and make dynamic changes to stepper current and stepper modes on the fly with gcode.

This video guide takes you step by step through how to configure for the three available modes, including setting microstepping, VREF and any Marlin firmware changes. This guide is to suit an MKS Gen L mainboard previously fitted to an Ender 3. There will be slight differences between 2208 board manufacturers but I've tried to account for those as much as possible.

As with the TMC2100s, you won't need TL smoothers or stepper motor dampers. You can also fit less of them (eg only X and Y axis) to save money.

In the next video, I…