Stepper motor drivers

This library will be compatible with most of the 2 phase stepper motor driver boards that feature 2 full H-bridges or 4 half-bridges such as MC33926, L298, L293 and many more. In order for the driver board to work with the library it needs to be controllable either using

• 4 pwm signals or
• 2 pwm signals + 2 direction signals.

⚠️ DIR/STEP stepper drivers not supported!

This library does not support stepper drivers with DIR+STEP (step and direction) interface such as A4988, DRV8825, TB6600, TB6560 and similar.

💡 Driving stepper motors with BLDC drivers

You can also use any (6PWM and 3PWM) 3-phase BLDC motor drivers to drive any stepper motor, using the hybrid stepper mode. This is sometimes a simpler solution as you can use the same board for both BLDC and stepper motors, and it can also provide better performance as the BLDC drivers are usually more powerful than the stepper drivers. See an example of NEMA17 with SimpleFOCShield in the example projects.

The choice of stepper driver depends directly of the stepper motor you are using, basically make sure the stepper driver can provide the current the motor needs to perform.

Supported board examples

Here are some stepper driver boards that are supported by this library.

In short: use a dedicated stepper driver for the simplest setup, two DC drivers for higher current options, or two BLDC drivers when you also want hybrid stepper mode and board reuse.

SimpleFOClibrary will also support some fully integrated solutions

Alternatively, you can use two DC motor driver boards, one for each phase of the motor. Here are some examples:

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