I'm new to Arduinos and want to send step and direction signals to a stepper driver to move a large stepper. The driver just needs 5V signals and will take care of stepper movement (in other words I don't need a separate board).
I want to start first with a "blinking led" type of program just to get the thing to move and then later I want to be able to input a move amount and direction on an LCD panel.
Would the simplest starter kit to get me going just be an Arduino with a 16x2 LCD keypad shield? Or will I need more than this?
If you have a stepper driver that takes step and direction pulses from two Arduino pins the following code should be able to make it move. Obviously you will need to ensure that the pins used in the code correspond with how your stepper driver is connected to the Arduino.
// testing a stepper motor with a Pololu A4988 driver board
// on an Uno the onboard led will flash with each step
// as posted on Arduino Forum at http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=208905.0
byte directionPin = 9;
byte stepPin = 8;
int numberOfSteps = 50;
byte ledPin = 13;
int pulseWidthMicros = 50; // microseconds
int millisbetweenSteps = 50; // milliseconds
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println("Starting StepperTest");
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
delay(2000);
pinMode(directionPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(stepPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(directionPin, HIGH);
for(int n = 0; n < numberOfSteps; n++) {
digitalWrite(stepPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(pulseWidthMicros);
digitalWrite(stepPin, LOW);
delay(millisbetweenSteps);
digitalWrite(ledPin, !digitalRead(ledPin));
}
delay(3000);
digitalWrite(directionPin, LOW);
for(int n = 0; n < numberOfSteps; n++) {
digitalWrite(stepPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(pulseWidthMicros);
digitalWrite(stepPin, LOW);
delay(millisbetweenSteps);
digitalWrite(ledPin, !digitalRead(ledPin));
}
}
void loop()
{
}