Prototype:
I have created a prototype on a prototyping board.This did not end well, because of my rather old timed soldering equipment, and mainly because of my almost forgotten soldering skills. So although I have managed to create it, and run it a couple of times, it seemed, that there is a cold solder somewhere. So it has not been working as I have expected. After replacing the faulty transistor (my first real suspect, I thought it had burned with my crappy soldering) it went well this time.
Still it is nothing I could be proud of.
Nevertheless I planned to create a Release Candidate, so I bought some things on the net. Modeled the PCB at the beginning using fritzing but the results looked bad (because a lack of functionality that would rearrange my paths orthogonally), at the end using a brute force (Gimp). The results are actually something I can be proud of (Image 1).
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| Image 1. Stepper driver PCB. |
More details concerning the RC version soon :). Actually the description is not needed to fully understand how to solder all elements. The only things I will mention here will be the inputs (lower right part of the board), the current/power (upper left), and the stepper connections (upper middle part).
Perspectives:
The PCB I have imagined will be a module which I want to connect to other modules. The reason for it is the number of inputs I am able to provide for the steering of the stepper. Arduino would most probably not be able to cope with 4 steppers, where each one has 6 inputs because my board does only have 14 of them. So I will try to minimize the driver inputs using the karnaugh method, I predict that out of 6 inputs it will reduce itself to only 4, and adding a counter to it will reduce itself to only 2 per stepper. So it seems to be a lot of fun and hard prototyping work.
Wish me luck.
