stepper motor pulse length

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Hello. i was wondering about controlling a stepper motor. the driver i will use has step dir and enable pins. just to make sure that i get what is going on could someone confirm that this is right: dir is set to HIGH or LOW for direction, enable is HIGH or LOW to turn the motor on and off, and a pulse on step will make the motor advance one step.

i was looking at one code and for the step pulse, i found

digitalWrite(step, LOW);
digitalWrite(step, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(200);

in a loop.. it said something about the delay being specific for that motor. i cant find any relevant info on the steppers data sheet.. is this a good value for steppers in general or does it vary? im using a nema 23 motor.

thanks

2

It varies motor to motor. Once you get it running, it's pretty easy to play around with the delay until you find what the fastest speed is.

3

National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) are only motor enclosing standards...
placement of holes and dimensions...

See your specific motor specs for details on steps.. In your case no info so EXPERIMENT, it depends on the load on the motor :wink:

:sunglasses:
David

4

The delay controls how many steps per second and this is the speed of the motor. The maximum speed depends on the size of the motor, what the supply current is, what the supply voltage is and how much mechanical load it is under. As these are things that will be unique to any one application it tends not to make it into data sheets.