Saturday, October 28, 2017

How to use A4988 stepper motor driver module tutorial

A4988 stepper motor driver module

This driver can be used to easily control a bipolar stepper motor or a uni-polar stepper connected in a bipolar mode. Can output up to 2A per phase (with a heatsink) and works with motor voltages from 8 to 35 volts.

  • Simple step and direction control interface
  • Five different step resolutions: full-step, half-step, quarter-step, eighth-step, and sixteenth-step
  • Adjustable current control lets you set the maximum current output with a potentiometer, which lets you use voltages above your stepper motor’s rated voltage to achieve higher step rates
  • Intelligent chopping control that automatically selects the correct current decay mode (fast decay or slow decay)
  • Over-temperature thermal shutdown, under-voltage lockout, and crossover-current protection
  • Short-to-ground and shorted-load protection

A4988 and Nema17

Library for A4988 stepper motor driver using timer interrupt

Update 4, October, 2023: I have made a new library for controlling stepper motor drivers that supports multiple motors and has a better acceleration algorithm. It can also coordinate xyz steppers.

This library is designed for AVR ATmega328 microcontroller, but with few adjustments can work with any AVR microcontroller with at least 3-4 Kb of flash program memory.
At the moment only one motor is supported.

Features

  • the interrupt can be triggered by Timer0 or Timer1
  • automatic microstepping mode selection
  • can work with constant and very low speeds
  • accelerated speed mode, with separate acceleration and deceleration settings
  • can work with only one pin of the microcontroller if the rest are hardwired

Nema 17 Bipolar Stepper Motor

Characteristics:


Features
Program Memory
Data Memory (SRAM)
All enabled
3552 bytes
40 bytes
Acceleration, no microstepping
3088 bytes
40 bytes
Microstepping, no acceleration
2104 bytes
14 bytes
No microstepping, no acceleration
1724 bytes
12 bytes

Compiled using avr-gcc (WinAVR 20100110) 4.3.3 and -Os optimization level and MATH_LIB = -lm.
If MATH_LIB = -lm is commented out in Make file, the memory with all functions enabled is 6520 bytes program and 304 bytes data memory.So allways uncomment MATH_LIB = -lm.