Run Nema Stepper 17 with Raspberry Pi

Robotics and electronics discussion Electronics
1

Hi,

I tried to run a stepper motor with my raspberry Pi 3+, it all worked well in the beginning but then I fried the chip. I am using a 12V 5A power supply and my stepper has a rated current of 2Amps and coil resistance of 1.1Ohm. I contacted the support of Adafruit and they recommended Pololu. But now I am puzzled on which stepper motor driver is suitable. I am very new in electronics and thus not quite familiar with what to bear in mind when choosing such components.

Best wishes,
Tobia

2

Hello, Tobia.

We have a few stepper motor drivers and Tic stepper motor controllers that might work for a stepper motor like that, but I am not sure which will fit best into your current setup with your Raspberry Pi 3+. Can you tell me what driver you were using before it fried and if you had any other electronics between your Raspberry Pi and the driver? Could you post links to what you are using?

- Patrick

3

Hi Patrick,

I was using the recommended software from Adafruit. I was basically following the instruction from this page:

except the fact that I did not check the current rating of the motors sufficiently. My setup consists only of these parts:

  • Raspberry Pi 3+
  • 12V, 5Amp power supply for the motor HAT
  • two Nema 17 stepper motors (2Amps, 1.1Ohm)
  • Adafruit DC and Stepper Motor HAT

The motor HAT was plugged directly onto the Raspberry Pi.

The moment I fried the chip was when I run the Example Code several times in a short interval. It can be found at the end of this page:

Thanks for your help,

Tobia

4

We do not have any stepper motor drivers or controllers available in a Raspberry Pi HAT form factor, but we do have a few drivers and controllers that are appropriately more powerful for your 2A motor than what you were using before. For easy implementation with a Raspberry Pi, I recommend our Tic stepper motor controllers since they support a variety of control interfaces including USB, TTL serial, and I2C. In fact, we have a Linux version of our Tic control center software for Raspberry Pi, and the Tic user’s guide includes a few Python examples. The Tic T249 or the Tic 36v4 would probably be the best options for a 2A stepper motor.

- Patrick

5

Thanks for the great support. I am curious if there are also simpler/cheaper solutions such as TB67S128FTG Stepper Motor Driver Carrier?

6

The TB67S128FTG or any of our other stepper motor drivers with a sufficiently high current rating could work for driving your stepper motors if you can figure out how to control it from your Raspberry Pi, which may be difficult depending on what you are trying to do.

- Patrick

7

Okay, I understand. Lets say I would like to use the Tic 36v4, how would I need to set it up with my raspberry pi and the power supply and so on? Is there a manual for it?

And how would it work if I need to connect two Tic 36v4 to one raspberry pi?

8

You can find that information, including how to connect multiple Tics to a single controller (which will depend on the particular control interface you use), in the Tic user’s guide, which is also available on the product page under the resources tab.

- Patrick