MACH3 is very a versatile CNC machine controller and it can be adapted to practically anything you can think of. For most people, however, it is all of this flexibility what makes it so daunting to give it a try.…
Category: Motors
A look at different motion control technologies
Secrets of CNC Control Board Electronics
The CNC Mother Board is a one stop solution, housing the great majority of blocks you will need to put pretty much any CNC machine together. That is CNC routers or mills, CNC plasma cutters, CNC lathes, etc. In this…
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…
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…
Why Is It Called Mega Motor???
Can I hook a million motors to this board? Well, I would have to admit that a million motors would be a little bit too much. Actually, about 999,999 too many. No! The AE-MDL-MegaMotor II is not a board to…
My Chip Is Running Hot! Am I Doing Something Wrong?
OK, you are not doing anything wrong. Maybe you did something wrong a few years ago when you decided to be born in this universe as the laws of physics are pretty much defining that your chip will run hot.…
How to Select the R and C at the RCx Pins on the DRV8811 Bipolar Stepper Driver
The DRV8811 is clearly a bipolar stepper driver that makes our lives considerably easier. It is just so simple to drive a stepper with this powerful device, as well as similar internal indexer microstepping engines, who takes care of all the nuances…
Tackling the Brushless DC Motor Experience
I have been called the stepper expert at work. Although I have been developing stepper hardware and software for the last 10 years, I am hardly an expert at all. But when compared against Brushless DC Motors, or BLDC, then…
How to Get the 2.5A Out of your DRV8811 Bipolar Stepper Motor Driver
When I designed the AE-MDL-STPR1 I was naive enough to think that a two layer copper and 2″ by 2″ board should be a good platform to run the DRV8811 bipolar stepper motor driver at whatever current I could…