Microstepping problem

Hi,

In order to avoid mechanical noise I need to run a stepper motor at approx. 80 rpm at 1/32-stepping. as you can see there is not much time for every step signal and my Arduino Mega2560 gets to it’s hardware limits. therefore I need to find another solution. My idea was the following:
Either a stepper driver which provides an own clock, so that I only have to tell the desired speed and the driver itself cares about the stepping.
Another solution would be to find a hardware setting that just multiplies the given steps e.g. by the factor of 10, so that my arduino board has only 1/10 of the work. Is that realistic? Is there any ic or something that just cuts an input signal into 10 pieces?

Hello.

I am not aware of any stepper motor drivers or devices that can increase the number of pulses or drive a stepper motor from a speed command.

Standard stepper motors often require 200 steps per revolution. If this is the case for your motor, at 80 rpm with 1/32 microstepping, it should require about 8500 pulses per second. This should be well within the Arduino Mega’s capabilities. How are you generating the pulses? If you post your code, I would be happy to take a look at it.

- Jeremy