In 2010 I decided to build a 3D Printer. For days, I glued myself into all of my computers (at work, on my studio, on my massage chair, and at bed) blackholing as much information as I could into my…
Author: avayan
How to Select Your Next Motor Driver
One of the questions that I get the most is how to select a motor driver (AKA Power Stage) from the ocean of available units out there. I am a big fan of TI’s offerings, or a family of devices…
The Singing Stepper: A DRV8818 Primer
The code for this project can be downloaded here: MIDI_2_STEPPER_MSP430F1612_10-25-2012 I am not the first one. Many more, and before me, have used a frequency signal to feed into a stepper driver which then in turns lets the stepper sing a…
Power Dissipation and Power Losses; Which One is Which???
Some time ago I wrote about power losses as a means to explain why a motor driver circuit gets hot. You can read the details of this article at the “My Chip Is Running Hot” posting. On this previous article, I detail…
Featured Engineer at EE WEB
This posting is rather short as it points to a longer one. I had the honor of being the Featured Engineer at the online Electrical Engineering Community magazine EE WEB. You can find the published article / interview HERE. EE WEB…
How to Wire Your Stepper
You have a stepper motor and you are wondering how to wire it to your driver board. If you have a four lead motor, then that is plenty easy. But what if the motor has five, six or even eight…
Controlling a Motor With Your Computer Part IV: The Hardware Side
I have documented how to take your computer, stuff a five byte data packet and send it serially to your microcontroller through your serial port. Awesome! But wait! Computers just don’t have a serial port any more. How useless can…
Controlling a Motor With Your Computer Part III The Windows Application Side
This posting may be semi wrongly titled. It refers to a Windows Application as that is what I will detail, but the truth is you can use any application on any OS. If you prefer Linux, I imagine there are…
Controlling a Motor With Your Computer Part II The Firmware Side
Most of my firmware applications will have a very simple real time operating system running in the background and calling one out of eight tasks every 250 us. What this means is that each task is called every 2 ms,…
Controlling a Motor With Your Computer PART I
I was recently asked to document the system that I use to control stepper motors (or any motor, for that matter) by sending serial commands with a computer. I realize the concept can be intimidating, but is really not that…