Orangutan B-328 and Stepper Motor

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1

I’m using an Orangutan B-328 to drive a Nema 11 Stepper motor. Both parts are from Pololu. After about 3 or 4 seconds I get a pause in the motor movement. After that I get the pause almost every second after that.

I love the idea of having a h-bridge built into a micro controller board!

The Parts:
Orangutan B-328
Nema 11 Stepper motor (Same results from a Nema 8 and 14)
Li-ion Battery Pack 7.4V (About 8Volts)

Thanks a million for any help!

I get the same results from my project code, and a simple movement code.
Here is a Basic Code:

#include <Stepper.h>
const int stepsPerRevolution = 200;                                    
Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 5,6,3,11);            

void setup() {
  myStepper.setSpeed(60);
}

void loop() {
  myStepper.step(stepsPerRevolution); 
}
2

Hi.

I am sorry you are having problems with your stepper motor. Do you have any specifications for your stepper motor, such as the current and voltage ratings? For example, could you provide a link to the product page or datasheet? Could you also tell me what voltage you are supplying to your stepper motor?

-Taylor

3

-Taylor thanks for the help!

Here are the links to the motor that I’m testing with.
pololu.com/catalog/product/1206
pololu.com/catalog/product/1209

The power supply is a Li-ion Battery Pack 7.4V 1800mAh. It’s a canon camera battery LP-E6.

4

Hi.

It sounds like your Baby Orangutan motor drivers are probably overheating. For example, if you supply 7.4 V to your #1209 stepper motor, which has a rated current of 1 A/phase at 2.7 V, each coil will be trying to draw nearly 3 A.

I strongly suggest you consider getting a dedicated stepper motor driver with built-in current limiting. Alternatively, if you really want to use the drivers on the Baby Orangutan, you should get a stepper motor with a rated voltage above your supply voltage and a rated current within what the Baby Orangutan drivers can handle, such as this.

-Taylor

5

The problem isn’t in the motors at all. The thing is that, by default, Orangutan gives full power to the motors, which is about 1A. To reduce power consumption, you must apply this code https://www.pololu.com/docs/0J15/5. Play with the values of pwm, which will control the amount of power that would going to the motor. But the sad thing is that it doesn’t help it. The motor stops after about two minutes, despite the fact that Orangutan isn’t heating up at all.

6

Hello, yur.

This is not correct. The motor driver output current is not limited to 1 A, and they will deliver much more than this if your motor tries to draw higher currents. In the case of our #1209 stepper motor powered at 7.4 V, the coils will try to draw almost 3 A from each driver channel while that channel is on, and this will rapidly overhead the driver. However, you are correct that you can effectively reduce the current by lowering the motor driver PWM duty cycle.

If the motor driver is stopping after a certain period of time and then starts again if you let it sit for a while, then there is a good chance it is overheating (or you have a bug in your code). What is your stepper motor and supply voltage, and what duty cycle are you using? Is the time it takes for the motor drivers to shut down affected by how quickly you are stepping?

- Ben