I'm pretty new to the Arduino world so forgive me if I forget something important, I'll try to fix that as soon as possible.
I am working on a project where I want to control 4 stepper motors individually. My main problem is the non existence of electronic knowledge, so I want to make the power supply for all the motors as simple as possible.
I managed to connect and use some Nema17 motors with a4988 drivers, but it was getting really messy.
Everywhere on the internet I find the cnc shield. This seems to be the essence of what I need: the ability of connecting 4 motors to the Arduino with 4 stepper drivers and a way to power them all.
I didn't order it yet because I'm unsure about the usage. In tutorials and videos about this motor shield they always use a program wich seems to be made for this shield to use it as a cnc board (logically). Is it necessary to use the software when using this board or am I able to access all 4 motors individually with a stepper library and the Arduino IDE, just how I would do it when I just connect the a4988 drivers to the Arduino uno ?
I. hope someone of you already got this board and could prevent some information for me.
for clearance there is a picture of the board I'm talking about below. Thank you for your help !
The CNC shield is just a convenient holder for the A4988 (or DRV8825) stepper motor drivers.
As you have not provided a link to the datasheet for your stepper motors I can't say if the A4988 is suitable. If the current required by the motors is 1.4 amps or less the A4988 should be fine.
I don't understand @zwieblum's comment about "decent drivers"
You can use the CNC shield with the GRBL program or with your own program.
On that board you will also only be able to use 3 of the driver slots as the fourth one is simply a MIRROR of one of the other drivers.
I have 4 motors connected to my CNC shield with the 4th motor wired to the A (red) driver slot and pin 12 set as the step and pin 13 set as the dir pins as shown in reply #4. All 4 motors are running fine and independently.
Grbl will not use the 4th motor, except as a mirrored axis, as the control pins for that motor are the spindle control pins.