I have learned that the ability of a stepper motor to produce equally sized microsteps depends in part on the ability of the driver board to approximate a sine wave. I wonder, therefore, if some boards out there are significantly better at producing accurate microsteps?
I ask in part because I've experimented with both the Big Easy Driver and the Quadstepper. I've seen very obvious non-linearities with the Big Easy Driver (A4988) which aren't as obvious since I switched to the Quadstepper (A4983).
The A4988 and A4983 should implement their sine wave calculation identically, or more precisely I can't find in their respective datasheets that would suggest they don't. Also, both the Quadstepper and Big Easy Driver implement mixed decay mode identically.... so not that either.
Yeah, from what I could tell looking at the datasheets they look the same as regards microstepping (although I'm not too sure what to look for). In my case it could well be something else that's changed in my system that accounts for the differences. But might other drivers provide a better approximation to a sine wave and might that be important?