Wave drive? Type???

I'm trying to reduce some 'slippage' on my (crudely homemade) machine. Initial I was using stepgen type 9 to drive the x/y axis, however, I have been noticing a drift in one of my axis. The drift seems consistent enough to suggest I'm loosing steps in one direction only.

One of the things I tried was changing from 1/2 stepping (type 9) to full stepping (type 5). This almost seemed to make things worse as there was now clearly random / intermittent slippage (I could hear the stepper 'jumping'), even at reduced feed rates. In monitoring the i/o pins it appears that type 5 is simple full step, one pin at a time stepping. I would like what I believe is called wave drive full stepping. This is where there is always 2 pins active, but still only full steps are taken.

1 - 1100
2 - 0110
3 - 0011
4 - 1001
etc.

How do I configure this?

I'm not sure where I found it (searching at work), but I stumbled across some information that suggested type 6 is the wave drive I'm looking for. I tried it tonight, and

It is the wave drive

and

it seems to have solved the drifting problem.

I'm still not sure why it fixed it, other than the wave drive provides maximum torque since there is alway one coil energized while moving and two while standing still. I was noticing that the stepper did not seem to have a lot of torque using type 9 (half stepping), and type 5 was even less torque.

How does the documentation get updated? The page you mention should be updated to state type 6 is wave, and type 5 is not.

The page I found the information on is:

wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?act...se&diff=1&id=Stepgen