Stepper Motor Controller
This was a simple project to inexpensively add computer control
motorization to some old translation stages that were lying
around. The key to this project was to use computer controlled
stepper motors. After searching web, I found some fairly cheap IC
chips that allows this from Ferrettronics.
The next thing I needed were the stepper motors. Originally I
tried to use those from old 5 1/4 floppy disk drives, but they didn't
have enough torque. In the end, I my I finally had shell out
$70.00 (my boss's money of course) a piece for some high toque stepper
motors from LIN Engineering.
For the power supply, and electronic housing I used an old 386 computer
case and power supply. I even left the floppy disk drive in there
to make the system look more impressive. The computer control was
accomplished using a custom Java program, TimeStep, through the serial
port. Overall, the entire
thing worked pretty well, and it cost a fraction of what a commercial
system would.
