Stepper motor driver
stepper motor driver
You do not need a "controller" to drive a stepper motor. All you need is a couple of transistors.
I've been driving these things just fine using an opto-isolator and a power transistor hooked up directly to my printer port since way back in 1986, and it still works today.
Personally - I think the idea of using a stepper driver is really silly. You don't need 2 computers and two sets of everything just to energize coils in sequneces! Worse - the fact that you've stuck another gadget between your computer and the stepper means that you've doubled the complexity of your computer code, and halved the useful info you can get back all at once. Yes - it's 400% sillier to use a driver, than to simply drive it direct from your PC!
One major thing lacking from drivers, is the PCs ability to measure the current the stepper is drawing. Without the driver, it's a simple matter to let the PC get this extra bit of info, and then your code can calculate the force that your steppers are experiencing - so you could for example detect a stall, or make them go faster when they're under less load, etc etc.
-- anonymous
Just my 2 cents: You have no idea of the physics behind a motor and whats going on inside a stepper driver. Of course you are able to make a motor turn by just using some transistors and portpins. But if you want to get high performace out of it, this is the wrong way. And the complexity of your software won't increase when using a driver with a simple step and direction interface. So what's the problem?
Regards Thorsten Ostermann
The anonymous poster is be right -- driving steppers using an opto-isolator and a few transistors plugged into a Centronics style printer port works fine -- and is the most common way of using EMC including EMCRepRap. Alas, it's getting harder and harder to find a computer with such a port. Those of us without such a port are forced to use unnecessarily complicated arrangements. --DavidCary 18:22, 28 September 2012 (UTC)
split
This page is getting a bit long.
I suggest splitting along the lines of
- information about stepper motors themselves stay at stepper motor
- information about power drivers directly connected to the steppers gets moved to the "Stepper Drivers" section of Alt Select Electronics. Unless you have a better idea?
--DavidCary 02:58, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
