Need help with stepper driver and power setup

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
1

I am working on designing a specialized CNC machine and am currently in the process of determining the electrical system to control my stepper motors. The machine contains 10 stepper motors of varying sizes:

  • 6x non-standard size (2 phase, 5V, 0.34A, 8.5mH/phase, 14.7ohm/phase) used for microfluidic control
  • 4x NEMA 23 (2 phase, 2.3V, 3A, 3.5mH/phase, 2.4ohm/phase) used for xyz axis movement
    All of the motors meet the torque and speed requirements for my application. None of them have encoders, but I will potentially have limit switches for my xyz motion. Two of the NEMA 23 motors will be moving the same axis, so I plan on wiring them in series off of a single driver. All of the other stepper motors will need independent control.

I was thinking of using an Arduino Due or Mega as a controller for my 9 stepper drivers, which will be powered by 2 separate power supplies (one for the 4 NEMA 23 motors and one for the 6 non-standard motors). I still have yet to determine what drivers or power supplies to use, but I plan to use this site to help with determining my power supply requirements. My goal is to drive all 10 motors from a single computing device.

Any insight or advice on what products to use, how to control this setup, and if or how I should change my approach would be greatly appreciated.

2

Pololu has a variety of stepper drivers and they have good pages showing how to use the drivers. 7 step/dir drivers would take 14 pins, minimum. You could do that with an Uno, but would be pretty short on pins for other stuff. A Mega may be the way to go if you want to add a display or something.