A4988 Controller with arduino

Hi,
my name is Jorge Davo and I’m a robot maker
now, I’m working on a robot and to make work some movements I needed steppers, I bought the pololu A4988 stepper driver and some nema 24 steppers and I have been trying to make them work with my arduino uno but, since i need a very good programing i couldnt so, can someone give me a code that
*works with 7 steppers
*each stepper has 2 buttons and each button controls one direction
*when each button is pressed the stepper will start rotating in one direction and when you stop pressing the button the steepper stops
*each steper has a potentiometer to change its speed [optional]
example:
i have two buttons, one stepper and one potentiometer; when I press one button the stepper will start rotating in one direction until you stop pressing the button
at last I have one potentiometer to change the speed of the motor

if anyone can help me with these I will realy apreciate it :smiley:

                                                                             Jorge Davo

Hello, Jorge.

It is not clear to me what you have already attempted, but I recommend starting simple, and then adding layers of complexity. First, get a single stepper motor stepping. Once that is working, you can add code for handling buttons and a potentiometer. Then, you could make additional connections to your microcontroller, and then modify your code to control the additional motors.

If you are stuck and tell me more specifically where you are at with your project and post what code you have tried, I would be happy to help you get further.

-Jon

Hi Jon
thanks for answering, the problem is I dont have a code that works
do you have a code that will help me start to program one of my steppers? like just to sweep the stepper one side to another so that I can modify it to make my robot work ?

                     Jorge Davo

We do not have example code for controlling stepper motors. However, to get started you should only need a single digital IO connected to the STEP pin, and you can tie the DIR pin to VCC or GND to select a direction of rotation. The stepper motor driver recognizes a low-to-high transition on the STEP input as a command to step, so you can control how fast the stepper steps by controlling the delays used in a loop that switches between logic low and high.

-Jon

I may be way off and way too late but it sounds like the button is a momentary “on” button for direction control.
Meaning that when you release it, it goes low again but when held, it keeps 5 volts on the Direction pin.
Just a thought.

Hope this helps.