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24v stepper controlled by aruduino

Controlling a 24v stepper motor with an arduino and mosfets.

Fish4Fun

So long, and Thanks for all the Fish!
Aug 27, 2013
481
Joined
Aug 27, 2013
Messages
481
BigOne5500,

I think there might be an elephant or two in the room no one has mentioned, and since you seem committed to designing/building a 24V stepper driver, I am going to go ahead talk a little about these elephants.....

Starting with the smaller elephant, while P-Channel mosfets appear to be ideally suited for H-Bridges, in reality they generally introduce some drive design challenges that require a fair amount of effort (and a fair number of "support" components) to over come which generally makes them more difficult to implement than other approaches....

What other choices could there be? You replace the P-Channel devices with N-Channel devices....Obviously this still requires "Level Shifting" to achieve High-Side turn-on; however, this approach has the advantage of being easily scaled from 24V to over 500V with only minimal changes in the design and BOM.... AND all of the active ("difficult to design") level-shifting components are readily available as ICs.... A common example would be the IR2101S, but there are literally hundreds of level shifting ICs available each offering slightly different features for various applications.... I would urge you to do a little reading on "High Side Switching" before you spend much more time on your schematic....

The larger elephant....You do know that full blown, mature design, production made, ready to use 24V stepper drivers up to ~2A are readily available from e-bay for ~$2 each? There are currently two very popular variations of these drivers (called "Step Sticks")....One is based on the A4988 chip and the other is based on the DRV8825 chip. There are millions of these stepper drivers in service driving the vast majority of steppers used in 3D printers....There are "Stepper Motor Shields" that will allow you to simply "plug-in" 4/5/6 "Step Sticks", dozens of "Libraries" and hundreds of "Sketches" to control them for various predefined purposes...The A4988/DRV8825 chips are widely used in standard consumer products like printers, copiers, fax machines etc, etc, it would be very difficult to improve on the functionality and performance to cost ratio.....

If your goal is higher current than the step-sticks are capable of (~2A), then there are other mitigating factors you should consider....primarily the relationship between voltage, current and inductance in steppers...specifically how these factors affect stepper performance....for a "quick" review on the topic you might look here: https://www.electronicspoint.com/resources/stepper-motor-max-rpm.54/

Good Luck!

FIsh
 

bigone5500

Apr 9, 2014
712
Joined
Apr 9, 2014
Messages
712
BigOne5500,

I think there might be an elephant or two in the room no one has mentioned, and since you seem committed to designing/building a 24V stepper driver, I am going to go ahead talk a little about these elephants.....

Starting with the smaller elephant, while P-Channel mosfets appear to be ideally suited for H-Bridges, in reality they generally introduce some drive design challenges that require a fair amount of effort (and a fair number of "support" components) to over come which generally makes them more difficult to implement than other approaches....

What other choices could there be? You replace the P-Channel devices with N-Channel devices....Obviously this still requires "Level Shifting" to achieve High-Side turn-on; however, this approach has the advantage of being easily scaled from 24V to over 500V with only minimal changes in the design and BOM.... AND all of the active ("difficult to design") level-shifting components are readily available as ICs.... A common example would be the IR2101S, but there are literally hundreds of level shifting ICs available each offering slightly different features for various applications.... I would urge you to do a little reading on "High Side Switching" before you spend much more time on your schematic....

The larger elephant....You do know that full blown, mature design, production made, ready to use 24V stepper drivers up to ~2A are readily available from e-bay for ~$2 each? There are currently two very popular variations of these drivers (called "Step Sticks")....One is based on the A4988 chip and the other is based on the DRV8825 chip. There are millions of these stepper drivers in service driving the vast majority of steppers used in 3D printers....There are "Stepper Motor Shields" that will allow you to simply "plug-in" 4/5/6 "Step Sticks", dozens of "Libraries" and hundreds of "Sketches" to control them for various predefined purposes...The A4988/DRV8825 chips are widely used in standard consumer products like printers, copiers, fax machines etc, etc, it would be very difficult to improve on the functionality and performance to cost ratio.....

If your goal is higher current than the step-sticks are capable of (~2A), then there are other mitigating factors you should consider....primarily the relationship between voltage, current and inductance in steppers...specifically how these factors affect stepper performance....for a "quick" review on the topic you might look here: https://www.electronicspoint.com/resources/stepper-motor-max-rpm.54/

Good Luck!

FIsh

Fish, I have been reading up on some things and it looks as if I may have delved into something larger than myself. Things are not looking good for this project log. I had an idea about what I wanted this to do but there were so many things that I did not understand about the operation of it.
 
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