PIC Stepper Motor Tester


Posted on Feb 6, 2014

Determining which drive wire is which on a unipolar stepper motor. This is the type of motor that I have most commonly found surplus or in salvage equipment Platform: PIC16F877A using BoostC connected via rs232 to a PC running a terminal program. The PIC chip is supplemented with a MAX232 chip and a ULN2003 driver. I have used a PIC 16F877A for the project, but pretty much any PIC with


PIC Stepper Motor Tester
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

a uart and another 4 free I/O lines should do. To increase the drive to the motor I used a ULN2803 which is simply an array of Darlington transistors and diodes to be used as a low side switch for each motor winding. There are other similar chips around or discrete devices can be used. I run the pic, on 5 volts, and a larger voltages for the stepper, up to the limit of the driver. ( the UNL2803 is good for 50 v at. 5 amp as a switch ) and the rating of the stepper motor. If you have a high power motor you may want a driver with more guts, Just put in some substitute. Coil drive is on or off there is no PWM involved here. Note that the hardware has substantial uncommitted resources. You could easily drive another motor for example. Also some of you may want to put some pull up or down resistors on some of the uncommitted resources. Instead of this board you could use the circuit from the PIC based Stepper Motor Dancing Analog Clock, the main difference is that that circuit does not use the MAX232 chip, it relies on an off board level shifter ( makes it easy to shift the level shifter from project to project while saving some money and board space ) All commands ( except stop should be terminated with a carriage return ) Note that the command interface is not very smart, giving parameters that are out of range my blow the whole program up. If so reboot the PIC. Do not send a new command ( except stop ) until earlier commands...




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