A few months ago I retrofitted an old foam cutter based on a MM2001 hardware.
This system works quite well, but the unipolar stepper motors are very weak and prevent any fast motion... which is "annoying" when the hot wire is at one end of the machine and you want to go to the opposite side...
So why not building a brand new controller with the following requirements :
Let's go it's an easy project which shouldn't cost more than 10$ (without motors) !
Schematics
This schematics is extremly simple as it implements 4 times the basic way to use a polulu driver
Apart from the steppers, the only usefull part is the hotwire. It's a 1m long 0.3mm nichrome wire which is fine tuned powered by a PWM under 24V (same PSU for the steppers).
Finally I have added two home switches inputs (homeX and homeY) although they are useless for a foam cutter!
And exposed a few more pins of the ESP32 to be used (or not) for future projects!
PCB
I have designed a nice and compact PCB allowing to "shield" the drivers and the ESP32 modules.
The PCB was kindly sponsored by PCBWay and is as usual of excellent quality.