I need to be able to drive a few stepper motors moving in microstep, each motor will have a 1kg shape attaced directly to its rotor. The stepper motor I have to use is the Astrosyn MY6403-02N (24V, 1.5A, Step 1.8 degree)
The reason for microstepping isn't for the position accuracy it is to cut the noise down as much as possible, having quite a few of these motors in a small area would otherwise end up very noisy.
I have used stepper motors a long time ago but never needed to use microstepping.
I have, as a refresher to myself built a few circuits all based on PIC Chips for the motor controller and a L298 to drive the stepper motor with a view to developing one or more of them into a microstepping circuit.
Building the statnard circuits was OK and worked fine. Once I looked at microstepping it was obvious that these first circuits needed too much changing to make them into microstepping circuits and so new circuits were looked into.
I'm not wanting to do all the PWM stuff with the PIC chip, I need to be able to just tell the motor driver chip what direction and by how many steps.
I need the PIC to do all tracking of which way the shape is pointing, how many steps and in what direction it needs to move to get to its next position.
I have been looking at several dedicated stepper motor driver chips from the likes of TMC, Texas, Allegro and others.
Most of the chips require setting up by using SPI and that is another of my stumbling points. I have used I2C but not SPI and that is an up hill struggle.
Currently I am having 2 motor driver boards made one based on a Texas DRV8825 and an Allegro A4988. I'll be able to attach one of my many PIC chip boards to them to control them to try them out (Fingers crossed).
I have previously had built a driver board that uses the TMC260 & TMC429 chips but have yet to get SPI working enough to be able to try it out.
If anyone wants to join in or helpme get something working sooner rather than later I'd appreciate it very much.
I have a good range of Pic chips, Pickit 2, Pickit 3, ICD3, several Pic demo boards and can get PCB made. In the past I have written Pic18 programs in assembly and C but now usually rely on using Flowcode to generate my code.
I think that is why I am having problems, been too long away from the guts of Pic programming.