hello community,
hello pololu team,
i like the Motoron M3S550 arduino shield.
is it possible to hack the firmware / does it already support a stepper-motor mode?
so i can use this cool board also as a very basic stepper motor driver?
i know - if i want to have a good stepper motor driver then i have to go to the special drivers for these!
but sometimes i just need a very basic one -
and therefore this board with its i2c control would be very nice!
sunny greetings
stefan
Hello, stefan.
For the most part, you can use any basic dual H-bridge driver to control a bipolar stepper motor (you can find a discussion about doing so in this forum thread), but there are many shortcomings that make it impractical to do so instead of using a more dedicated solution. Dedicated stepper motor drivers and controllers offer many beneficial features such as current limiting, micro-stepping, various decay modes, and other special features (depending on the driver), as well as a simplified control interface. In particular, you might consider our Tic stepper motor controllers, which have several control interfaces, including I2C, USB, and TTL serial. Alternatively, you might look through our various stepper motor drivers. A couple of those drivers also support higher level interfaces like SPI, such as the AMIS-30543 and the High-Power Stepper Motor Driver 36v4.
Brandon
thanks for your answer Brandon,
the TIC are cool - but for my educational target its to pricy…
and currently we only have these 5V low level geared stepper motors in our material set…
if we ever have a real stepper motor i definitely will use a real driver!
Hey Brandon,
i just looked through the Code in the Thread you linked.
as the Motoron uses I2C and a build in uC for controlling -
i am bound by what the library & the firmware gives me…
and as fare as i have scanned over the library there is no option to do something this low-level.
and if i want to do it all over i2c that would mean an insane traffic…
not a good idea either…
so i think currently it is NOT possible!
if it is possible to update the firmware / there are undocumented modes in the firmware or whatever -
please let me know!
sunny greetings
stefan
