how to control stepper motor

Highly recommend you spend $25 and buy the Stepper motor Controller Kit from All Electronics which contains the chip, switches, motor, PC board and basic instructions. You will get a real 'hands on' feel and know-how by playing around with it. Cat# SMKIT-2

- I am in no way associated with this company, just a very pleased customer for years.

Wayne

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And here's a useful spec sheet on the stepper motor control IC from that same site:

It has some typical application schematics to give you some ideas.

If you want to do all the control in software on the PIC, then all you need is the driver circuits.

A 5 wire motor probably has 4 coils with one wire as a common connected to all 4 coils. To control the motor, you must energize one coil at a time in sequence. To make it half-step, you can energize two coils at the same time to cause the motor to move to a position half way between two steps.

Normally, the +V motor supply will be hooked to the motor common, and the driver circuit will ground a coil to activate it.

The simple way to do this with a pic is to just use 4 output lines connected through a driver of some type (transistors or an IC driver) to the motor. The pdf above has example schematics for drivers.

Here's a site on stepper motors I just found that should help you as well:

There are ton's of sites on the net to give you ideas if you just Google a bit.

Since you appear to be based in India, I would assume buying a kit from a US-based retailer is not in your plans. Instead, you can go here for starters on figuring out the wiring diagram, as well as get microcontroller interfacing ideas:

Wire colors change, so yours may not be be exactly like that on the page. But do a Google search and you'll find plenty of this type of information. I Googled 'stepper motor wiring diagrams' and this was the first hit. You can do the same.

-- Gordon

if you have a digital camera of any sort, or if you dont, try getting an irc client ( like Xchat or MIRC) and join the #robotics channel of the freenode network (for example the irc.linux.org server), there are plenty of people who can help you realtime to get run your steppers, using whatever parts you can get. I'd dig into it now with you, but its hard when I keep forgetting what I'm talking about.

dan

abhi wrote: