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Saturday, January 12, 2013

Driving stepper motor with beaglebone. Part 2

Another robot in project. A few things about driving stepper motors with a4988 drivers.
The board takes about 120-150 mA without driving them and about 1.3 A with motors on. The faster they moves - the current will be lower. With full speed it is about 500 mA.
The stepper motor in stall state can be very hot - I think it is hotter than 60 C. But you can disable the motor in driver control, when it is not active. I disabled them on startup script and enable only when it is needed.
I am using C++ in eclipse with remote gdb from laptop running Ubuntu. The beaglebone using Ubuntu as OS from http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu
Note: The current measured from 12 V power supply.