I’m making a giant stopwatch as a stage prop controlled by a DRV8825 stepper controller.
I’d like to have a feature where I can press a momentary switch on the enable pin to temporarily disable the controller, and then be able to manually move the clock hand to a different position. Would moving the hand (and therefore the motor itself) create a back voltage which would damage the controller?
Back driving the stepper motor like that will generate a voltage at the driver outputs, so it is possible it could damage the driver. However, I suspect that just turning your motor by hand will not generate voltages high enough to be an issue. If you have an oscilloscope, you could measure the voltage on one motor output pin while back driving to check.
