Why microstepping is important to your extruder ?

 

For some time, the print quality of parts in one of my 3D printers had deteriorated and there were signs of over-extrusion. I also calibrated the extruder several times and I was sure that there was no problem. Outer walls The printed parts were of poor quality and the problem was only slightly improved by reducing the flow to 70%.
Flow of 70% is definitely not the right situation to go through easily. In these settings, there were still quality problems, and due to the large workload and lack of time, I had to continue this situation. The strangest thing was that due to the large reduction in flow that I had enforced, I saw the effects of under extrusion and over extrusion at the same time.

 
Anyway, I started troubleshooting and saw the filament move by the extruder. The filament moved in large steps. There is a general rule in all extrusion processes, and that is to pull molten material at a constant speed. I found out more carefully that after the last printer setup, I had set the microstepping extruder to 8. This prevented the stepper motor from moving smoothly and continuously.

 

 
 

This means that the molten filament does not come out of the nozzle continuously and uniformly, and thus the printing is not uniform. As microstepping increases, the steps become smaller and closer together as far as their separation can't be recognized. Look at this demonstrated graphic I made.

 

 So, microstepping is something. By the way, resolution and precision are two different concepts. Microstepping increases the resolution. In terms of precision, it won't necessarily  increase as it's related to precise positioning. A microstepping of, say, 1/32, expands possible 200 positions of a regular stepper motor to 3600. The driver performs it by powering the poles and switchings by sophisticated techniques.In an ideal step motor, there must be an even distance between each step. As the microstepping increase, equality between steps will slightly be missed. Thus, there may be a reduction in precision.