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Blog Stepper Motor Control with Raspberry Pico PIO and DRV8711 driver- Part 1: Hardware Provisioning
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  • Author Author: Jan Cumps
  • Date Created: 29 Mar 2025 8:17 PM Date Created
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Stepper Motor Control with Raspberry Pico PIO and DRV8711 driver- Part 1: Hardware Provisioning

Jan Cumps
Jan Cumps
29 Mar 2025

The Pico has a set of PIO co-processors. They are real-time controllers that can execute logic with deterministic timing. Ideal to run strict-timed sequences and state machines. And to implement extra peripherals.
In this series, I'm trying to use the PIO to control a TI DRV8711 stepper motor controller.

image

PIO allows the Pico to run the motor off-line, while the ARM cores (if you are using a Pico2, maybe the RISC cores?) do something else. You tell PIO what to do, and that's it. It 'll control the steps. At least, that's the goal of this exercise. I did something similar a few years ago with a TI Hercules µController.

Hardware Provisioning

For this blog series, I'm using TI's BoosterPack  for the DRV8711, with shabaz' PICO-EUROCARD. The design will work for any Pico in combination with the DRV8711 .

The motor is ADAFRUIT - 324 .

Resources needed: 

  • sleep, DIR and STEP pins
  • a SPI channel (note: the DRV8711 has active high CS)

These are the Pico resources I reserve:

signal DRV8711 Pico
SPI CLK SCLK CLK
SPI CS SCS IO17*
SPI MISO SDATO MISO**
SPI MOSI SDATI MOSI
direction DIR

IO4

step STEP

IO5

sleep SLEEP

IO14

reset nRESET

IO15

power

3V3

ground

GND

I have allocated the SPI channels. All other pins are GPIO. I will allocate them while writing the firmware, and update this bog.
* DRV8711 uses a chip select that's active high. Pico's SPI library doesn't support that, so I will bit bang that pin.
** DRV8711 outputs are open drain. The Pico will have to provide power via pull-ups..
In the next post I'll set up the SPI communication. After that, we 'll dig into the PIO state machine.

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  • Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps 1 month ago

     Stepper Motor Control with Raspberry Pico PIO and DRV8711 driver- Part 2: SPI 

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    Jan Cumps 1 month ago

     Stepper Motor Control with Raspberry Pico PIO and DRV8711 driver- Part 2: SPI 

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