Dear All

I want to control a Bi-polar stepper motor say about 2 to 3.5amps and would like to know if there's a stand-alone stepper driver kit on the market that would allow me to control stepper direction and RPM WITHOUT a PC.

My application is to fit a small milling machine with power feed to the X and Y axes. I do not want to go CNC.

I've seen very commonly available cheap driver kits such as the K179 (Uni-polar) which has built-in clock, direction and RPM controls which can be used stand alone available from www.kitsrus.com and other. But I need a Bi-polar that will do the same thing.

I would be happy to buy a ready made unit too if it will do what I want.

Thanks in regards

Trevor

 

I'm not sure about the operating procedure of a mill, but how do you expect to interface to the driver without a PC? DO you expect it to come with a little screen and buttons or what?

 

Try asking this on the cnczone.com forum.

 

Slo-Syn used to have stand-alone control boards available.

 

I have always wondered if I could drive a Stepper with a monostable 555 timer and a 4017 with transistors or MOSFET's on it to step up da power. I probably could, then I could just press the button to make it move one step or whatever. I would have the 4017 set up to only drive the # of coil's required, say a 4 coil Stepper then take the 5th output and tie that to the reset. I can try and make a schemmy for it if you want to. I would like to try this one day...

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MechTronics

World of Warcraft is a disease

 

Just out of curiosity, why bipolar and not unipolar?

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Spency.

PIC Micro's - Your mind is the limit

PIC's and interfacing with other devices - a PIC Basic Guide @ digital-diy.net

 

I'm guessing that is what is on his mill...

 

That would work for a unipolar, but the OP was asking for a bipolar.

After that though, you can take the mosfets and run them from a parallel port. Used qbasic and had something up and running inside of five minutes; control both ways based on keyboard input.
http://www.eio.com/jasstep.htm#operation

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-Ian

 

Hiya Trevor,
You might want to go checkout the 'easy steppin' book by square 1. I bought the book years ago when i first got into stepper motors and in the book is pretty well what your looking for. The pulser board would be easily modiefied and the translator and stepper drives are all there too , source code and schematics. With some thought this would by far be your cheapest option and also give you a run down on learning to control steppers using a pic. The book is abit outdated as they use the 16f84 but dont let that put you off as for the stepper novice this book is a must have.

Hope this Helps

Cheers Bryan

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" The only way to avoid human error is to avoid the use of humans"