For a project at my internship I have to build a gimbal, to drive the gimbal we have decided to use a NEMA17 motor with a built in encoderNEMA17 Closed loop motor with encoder. I have to drive 3 of these motors with an arduino Mega.
My question is how I should connect the motor with encoder to the arduino, like is there a shield or a accessoire you can buy to connect it too or do I have to give each wire a own port? I tried looking online but there is almost nothing online on the motor I am going to use in combination with the arduino.
I don’t know if I made this post correctly, but if people have more questions that would help get this answered. Please do ask them, and I’ll try my best to reply them.
Perhaps expand a bit on the description of what you expect the stepper motor to do and what is encoder supposed to do with your project. You will need a controller board for each of the stepper motors. You will need a power supply to supply the voltage you want for the stepper motor along with the total current needed for three of the motors.
You will also need wire to connect the power supply to the controller boards. Your common jumper wires will go up in smoke in just a second!
I moved your topic to an appropriate forum category @wally02.
In the future, please take some time to pick the forum category that best suits the subject of your topic. There is an "About the _____ category" topic at the top of each category that explains its purpose.
Its purpose is to get an input from the user via the serial port in degrees. The motor then moves the corresponding amount of steps to move to that angle. It then needs to hold that angle untill the input is changed to another angle. (The gimball moves in pitch, yaw and roll)
The whole system will be powered using this power supply. But power supply can be changed.
What do you recommend for me then?
(Also later in the project if this 1 gimbal is working they want to expand it to 6 gimbals, but that is a problem for in the future first i need to have 1 working.)
I just searched for a driver for the NEMA17 that supports the integrated encoder but the only thing i found was a CNC shield
If i use this i have the problem of connecting the encoders.
I could buy motors without encoders and use limit switches to make it find the middle(zero position), but these shields only come with connections for 3 limit switches and if i choose to use limit switches i need 6...
I recommend that you determine the current the wire needs to continuously carry. Then look a wire gauge table and pick a wire size that will safely carry the current. Engineering.
Stepper motors move in "steps", not in angles. They rarely, if ever, can match. If you try to use microstepping, 1/2, 1/4 1/8 steps. The stepper motor will always be at a full step position when you first power it up.
