Stepper motor controller

[Zoom]

Hello.

That is a fairly low-current stepper motor, so our A4988 carrier will work fine. If you plan on using microstepping, you might get a little better performance from our DRV8825 carrier since it has bigger current-sense resistors.

- Ben

Might be tricky driving these with a 2-cell lipo battery, do you think?

Thanks,
Colin

[ryantm]

Yes. The voltage of those two cells is probably nominally below the 8V minimum of the A4988 and the 8.2V minimum of the DRV8825.

- Ryan

[Zoom]

Yes. The voltage of those two cells is probably nominally below the 8V minimum of the A4988 and the 8.2V minimum of the DRV8825.

- Ryan

Yet this motor pololu.com/catalog/product/1207 is spec’d at 7.5 V. Am I right in thinking it can be run higher?

Thanks,
Colin

[ryantm]

Yes. We have a FAQ about it.

- Ryan

[Zoom]

Yes. We have a FAQ about it.
- Ryan

Excellent. Thanks Ryan.
Colin

[Zoom]

Hi, Colin.

Are there any particular features you are looking for? Is there a product that you know of that is almost what you are looking for but has some shortcoming for your application?
- Jan

Hi Jan, here’s another:
http://www.robotshop.com/ca/productinfo.aspx?pc=RB-Cyt-23&lang=en-US
Regards,
Colin

[queenidog]

I agree, a stepper controller would be great.

Also, how about a stepper motor tester? I made a crude one using a PIC processor, some Basic code and crude connection scheme so I could test my 200 stepper motors. My program allowed me to connect the 4, 5 or 6 wires of the motor to spring posts, run the program and determine by observation which one of the 6 cases I tested gave the smoothest spinning. From that I deduced how the wiring must be, which ones are pairs and which ones are not and the polarity of the wires. You could expand this to try to determine # of steps,degrees/step, test the current draw, etc. For # of steps, you could publish a protractor kind of guide that you could mount over the stepper shaft.

I tested at 5 volts to start and when I got poor spin or low torque, I upped it to 12 volts.

[Claire]

Hi, queenidog.

Thank you for the suggestion. It sounds like the test unit you made might have been helpful for you since you had to test so many motors, but it seems like you should be able to tell most of those things just using a multimeter, and if you don’t have specs for a motor, doing something like “upping it to 12 volts” might destroy your motor anyway.

-Claire

[Ben]

Yike, it looks like this thread is almost 10 years old! It took us a while, but we’re finally making a family of stepper motor controllers! The Tic stepper motor controller can control a single stepper motor through one of six control interfaces: USB, TTL serial, I²C, analog voltage (potentiometer), quadrature encoder, and hobby radio control (RC). The inaugural member is the T825, which features an integrated DRV8825, and more versions based on other drivers are in the works (for example, the T834, which features the DRV8834, should be available in a few weeks).

- Ben

[nexisnet]

Six years later, and the Tic stepper motor controllers are still the best! I have used dozens in professional projects and a couple personally as well.

Plugging another idea here, since my original wish came true: a Maestro-style scriptable Stepper motor controller, even for just a single motor (though multiple would also be cool).

Thanks!

[Ben]

Hey, Adam.

Thanks for the kind words and suggestion. Adding scripting support has been on our wish list for a long time. Unfortunately, there isn’t much space on the current microcontroller to do it well, and changing to another microcontroller would require redesigning most of the product, so it will likely still be a while.

- Ben