Resciently purchased Pololu 36v4 stepper motor controller and matched it with an Arduno nano, 36v power supply and a nema 23 stepper pullng 2A. Using the supplied high-power-stepper-driver i carefully wired it all together. First try everything worked perfectly.
Was super happy that the doc on the Pololu web site is wonderfuil.
My issue is about speed.
I cannot get the stepper motor over about 120 rpm. For my project this is really not a concern. I can easily work with the slower RPM. But for future knowledge, how can I get the stepper to run faster?
Research has led me to believe that I need to accelerate the stepper to faster speeds. Is there a stepper motor driver library that will support SPI and acceleration that I can use?
Also any doc on how to use the step and dir pins separate from the .step functions.
Implementing some acceleration probably would help you get to higher speeds. Unfortunately, we do not have any example code for the High-Power Stepper Motor Driver 36v4 that accelerates the motor. You could try modifying the BasicSteppingSPI example from our Arduino library by adding a for loop that decreases delay between steps at the start of each stepper movement. If you run into issues, you can post your code, and I will take a look.
Rather than using the step function, you could supply step signals directly to the driver’s STEP and DIR pins. This is what the BasicStepping example in our library does, so I recommend looking at what that program does to step the motor. More details on that interface are given in the DRV8711 datasheet which we link to from the resources tab of the carrier’s product page.
In addition to adding acceleration, this post has other tips for increasing the top speed of your motor. If you have a datasheet for your motor, you should also look at the pull-out torque curve in it to get an idea of what speeds are possible for your motor.
