Making a stepper motor driver

Hi good folks of element14, I am very new to this community. I am a mechanical engineering student. I have been watching The Ben Heck Show and I decided to make a 3D metal printer for my college project (An Open Source 3D Metal Printer Based On MIG Welders | 3D Printer Worlder).

Its quite a hard project as I have no idea about the electronics related to this thing. I still have few months to decide, so... anyway, first I am building a desktop plotter to try out my limit and I bought two old dot matrix printers and got two bipolar stepper motor assemblies (along with the carriage and belt) and two unipolar motors.

I tried to run these with a L298D IC with an arduino, but the IC burnt after a few seconds. The current might be high. How do I measure the current? These look like NEMA 17 motor. Can I use a ULN2803 IC for running these? How about the easy driver shield from sparkfun? (http://www.ebay.in/itm/EasyDriver-Shield-stepping-Stepper-Motor-Driver-V44-A3967-For-Arduino-/261670095717?pt=LH_Default…)

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Workshopshed over 10 years ago in reply to bradnorwood +1

Brad, that's 300 rupee's not $300 so about $5. Rajdeep, you can get a rough approximation of current from the 33Ω and 3.9Ω labels, I = V/R Assuming a 5v supply. First motor 1.2A x 2 coils so that's 2.4A…

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0 bradnorwood over 10 years ago

If your gonna spend $300 on a driver circuit, you might wanna look at a Printrbot kit for that much and learn how to build it, assemble it and operate it, once you've done that you can increase its size by prints you build.
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0 bradnorwood over 10 years ago

If your gonna spend $300 on a driver circuit, you might wanna look at a Printrbot kit for that much and learn how to build it, assemble it and operate it, once you've done that you can increase its size by prints you build.
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0 Workshopshed over 10 years ago in reply to bradnorwood

Brad, that's 300 rupee's not $300 so about $5.

Rajdeep, you can get a rough approximation of current from the 33Ω and 3.9Ω labels, I = V/R

Assuming a 5v supply.
First motor 1.2A x 2 coils so that's 2.4A.
Second motor 0.15A = 150mA, you have 2 coils energised per step so that's 300mA.

To measure the current you can use a multimeter in series with the coils or use a resistor and measure the voltage over it.

The ULN2803 is rated at 500mA so should be able to drive these but the sparkfun driver should give you more control. Here's a couple of posts about driving some much smaller stepper motors.

Workshopshed: Small stepper motors
Workshopshed: Clock Electronics Current
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