Right controller for an older 8 wire stepper motor?

Support Motor controllers/drivers and motors
1

Hey all! I was referred to come here from Adafruit. Apologies if this is a question that is easily answered, I did some searching but hadn’t found a good answer yet.

So I’m wanting to breathe new life into this old x,y microscope stage similar to this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Microscope-stage-with-x-y-motors-no-controller/132473152790.

According to the specs of the motors found here: http://www.probyte.fi/pdf/mae2220.pdf (page 10) the motor type is HY 200-2215-150 B 8. According to the spec sheet, the phase resistance is 1.5 ohms per coil. They’re rated at 1.5A and a max voltage of 75V. These motors won’t have to work very fast at all (doing microscopic photography), so I’m hoping I can run at a lower voltage as the torque required should be low, just to move those two plates around.

What would be a good stepper motor controller to match those beasty motors? Ideally would be using a Pi or Arduino Uno setup similar to the Adafruit Motor Shield V2, although my main goal is to just get the motors to move via computer control so if there’s a better way to do it other than Pi or Arduino I’m totally open to that. Any suggestions?

Thanks everyone for your help, trying to do as much research as I can, apologies if I missed something obvious. Thank you! :slight_smile:

2

Hello.

We have a number of products you could probably use to drive a motor like that. Our DRV8825 and MP6500 stepper driver carrier boards can both provide enough current (1.5A) to get the full holding torque from that motor, though you should be aware that you will need to wire the coil pairs (A, A’ and B, B’) in series rather than parallel (parallel wiring doubles the current requirement). Our carrier boards for those two driver ICs have step and direction pins that can be controlled by the GPIO pins on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

Alternatively, you might consider our Tic stepper motor controllers, which offer higher-level interfaces like USB and include software to configure the driver and control the motor. Our Tic T825 stepper motor controller uses the same driver IC as the DRV8825 carrier board. We also have a Tic based on the MP6500 driver IC under development that should be available soon.

You might look through the product pages and user’s guides for those products for more details about how they work and let us know if you have any additional questions.

-Nathan