Project with heavy duty stepper motor

Projects General Guidance
1

I am working on a project that will control a heavy duty stepper motor (150 oz. in.) and am wondering what the best hardware to use is. I have used these motors before with another type of microcontroller, but this time I want to use Arduino. I spent all day today trying to get it to work with a MotoMama but didn't have any luck. In fact I tried several steppers and not one worked. Either I have a bad shield or I wasn't doing something right. It can be frustrating using boards that have very little documentation and support.

Does anyone have experience driving stepper motors with Arduino? If so, what board/shield do you recommend?

I plan to eventually use the AccelStepper library because that is the only one I've found so far that incorporates acceleration and deceleration. If you think acceleration is not important, imagine going from 0 - 60 in your car in one foot. Not a good idea.

If you have used MotoMama successfully to run a stepper, I'd love to hear how you set it up. I bougth this shield because of the L298 driver with a large heatsink on it plus the XBee socket in which I'd like to incorporate a Bluetooth module.

Thanks for any feedback.

Scott

2

Before you connect anything up, find the voltage and current requirements of your stepper motor and ensure that the power supply, driver circuit, wiring and connectors are all suitable.

Then make sure you wire it up correctly, testing as you go.