Need a little help with my project (Step motor driver).

Hey, I'm building a model of a construction crane. Using 3 Step motors, 3 step motor drivers and a microcontroller. Also 2 voltage regulators. Gonna use a joystick to control the step motors.

Well...anyway I'm wondering how the Step motor drivers work and where to connect the step motors. Since the step motors usually have 4 wires, (2 bright coloured and 2 dark coloured). But which output pins on the PDB??

Using following components:
3x step motors
3x PDB 3517 (www.isk.kth.se/kursinfo/6b2267/elmotorstyr/pbd3517/pbd3517.pdf )
PIC18F4431 (https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/39616b.pdf)

Here is what I've designed so far:

Well...anyway I'm wondering how the Step motor drivers work and where to connect the step motors. Since the step motors usually have 4 wires, (2 bright coloured and 2 dark coloured). But which output pins on the PDB??

Click to expand...

Step motors with just four wires require a bipolar driver. However, the PDB3517 is a unipolar driver. Unless, the motor has leads for unipolar operation (5-6 leads) you can't use them on PDB3517.

Meaning 4 leads + 1 GND?

Ckramer said:

Meaning 4 leads + 1 GND?

Click to expand...

No. It's 4 leads + common supply.

A sample schematic is on the datasheet you just cited. Page 6 Figure 14.

Ok, Thanks! So if I have a motor with 5 leads, I connect them to output pins 1,2,4,5 and 13 or 14 on the PBD?