Add an industrial NEMA17 Stepper Motor to your CUBLOC or CuTOUCH

http://zedomax.com/blog/zedomax-diy-hack-add-an-industrial-nema17-stepper-motor-to-your-cubloc-or-cutouch/

Add an industrial NEMA17 Stepper Motor to your CUBLOC or CuTOUCH.
(CublocStudio v1.5.A & Above)

[gv data="PJHhXAL6iVY"][/gv]

Do u want to add a NEMA17 stepper motor to your CUBLOC or CuTOUCH?

Here’s how to do it w/ the new CublocStudio v.1.5.A.

Download the new beta version here.

Today we will use a R208 Microstep Driver from RMS Technologies and a NEMA-17 Stepper Motorfrom AutomationDirect.com.

I was thinking today
that I needed to make use of the some stepper motors for industrial apps.
With the 3 new commands w/ CublocStudio v.1.5.A upgrade,
I think I can control a stepper motor very precisely and accurately.

Anyways, my plan is to eventually make some robots with this stepper motor, here we go.

Required Parts: 1 R208 Microstep Driver order from www.linengineering.com 1 NEMA-17 Stepper Motor (any NEMA17 Stepper Motor would work) Part # STP-MTR-17048 order from www.automationdirect.com 1 CB280 1 Study Board

Motor Driver & Motor Connections

All right, first, I decided to have a look at the R208 Microstep Driver manual.

If you skim through, you will find the pin assignments and a diagram like this:

As you can see here, you want to connect as shown.
Connecting the motor should be pretty easy to do.
You can ground Pin 2,3 for now to set at FULL step mode,
which will turn the motor a FULL step per pulse sent from CUBLOC.

Here’s the pin2 and 3 specs:

I decided to connect direction Pin 5 to 5V for now,
but I can hook it up to one of the CUBLOC I/O pins to control direction later.

Connect Pin 9(Yellow) to any of the I/O pins on the CUBLOC.
I’ve connected mine to P5, port 5.

Let’s take a brief look at the motor specs too:

and:

The chart here shows that the motor will have a different characteristics depending on the stepping method used.
We are using Full step, so we should have lots of torque,
but shouldn’t expect too much RPMs…

After putting everything together, you should get something like below:

There are 3 new commands for stepper motor w/ the new CublocStudio.

Command	Syntax	Features
STEPPULSE	STEPPULSE [channel], [Port Number], [Frequency], [# of pulses]	Output set number of pulses @ set frequency to set port. - Maximum Frequency: 15KHz - Channel must equal 0 - When using channel 0, PWM 3,4,5 may not be used
STEPSTOP	STEPSTOP channel	Stop outputting pulses
STEPSTAT( )	variable = STEPSTAT(channel)	Return # of pulses left to output

The channel is referred to as Steppulse channels.
But as of now, you can only have 1 channel for CB220, CB280, CB290, CT1720, and CT1721.(Classified: Future modules CB4XX, will have 2 channels.)

Anyways, you can set the any Port to output your step pulses.

This command will accurately output desired # of pulses @ desired frequency up to 15kHz,
which is what you need for Step motor control.

Now, let’s make a simple BASIC code that will output to my NEMA17 motor @ 1kHZ.

Download stepper motor source code here

Source Code [steppermotor001.cul]Const Device = CB280 #define PORTNUMBER 5 Dim ct As Long Dim steps As Integer Dim Frequency As Long Output PORTNUMBER ct=0 Frequency=100 steps=Stepstat(0) Debug Dec steps,Cr Do Steppulse 0,PORTNUMBER,Frequency,1000 ‘Stepstat() function returns current # of steps steps=Stepstat(0) Do While steps>0 steps=Stepstat(0) Debug Dec steps,Cr Loop Debug “Frequency: “, Dec Frequency,Cr If Frequency<1200 Then Frequency = Frequency + 400 End If Delay 300 Loop

As you can see in the above, Steppulse 0,PORTNUMBER,Frequency,1000
command will output 1000 pulses to the step motor starting @ frequency of 100Hz.

This motor is rated at 1.8 degrees per step which equals 200 steps per revolution.

By outputting 1000 pulses, the motor should turn 5 times since 1000/200 = 5.

We will use Stepstat() to wait until all the pulses have been outputted
before increasing the Frequency by 400Hz and outputting pulses again.

You should see the motor slowly increasing in speed and topping out at 1.2kHz.

You can do higher frequencies by adjusting the motor driver’s pin 2 and pin 3,
which will allow you to get higher resolution up to 1/8 steps.

If you look at the following video,
you can see that at maximum speed of my motor stopping at the tip of my finger every 5 turns.

Now I think u should be able to make some stepper motor apps pretty easily…

If you are having any trouble with above app, please e-mail max@zedomax.com

If you have any cool apps you’d like to share, please e-mail to max@zedomax.com