running ten stepper motors from PC?

Hi everybody,
I'm pretty familiar with stepper motors and drives having built many different machines over the years.

I'm working on a moving sculpture project and am trying to figure out how I could control say 10 steppers from a laptop PC.

Any Ideas?
The motion I'll be asking of the steppers will be pretty basic.
I'm guessing I'll need:
steppers motors
A drive for each or a Multi-drive (s) to accommodate the steppers
Some sort of software that will send step and dir signals to each drive.

Any help is much appreciated!!

The most I've seen a breakout board control is 5 axes. Maybe you could gang up two of them. But you'd still need a separate driver for each motor. If the motion you need is pretty basic, maybe a different kind of motor that's easier to run would work. If you had ten regular DC gearmotors, for instance, connected to a breadboard, it would be pretty simple to give them on and off signals to roughly control the motion of your sculpture.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by awerby

The most I've seen a breakout board control is 5 axes. Maybe you could gang up two of them. But you'd still need a separate driver for each motor. If the motion you need is pretty basic, maybe a different kind of motor that's easier to run would work. If you had ten regular DC gearmotors, for instance, connected to a breadboard, it would be pretty simple to give them on and off signals to roughly control the motion of your sculpture.

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Interesting idea. I've become so accustomed to working with Steppers I hadn't thought of this. I'm not sure I would be able to get coordinated movement with gear motors but I can certainly see the benefits of the simplicity.
Any off the shelf BOB that I could control a bank of SS relays with? Software?
USB would be nice since parallel ports are going the way of the dodo.

Is the motion fixed / always the same? Or will you change programs?

Could do with an arduino / microcontroller (or multiple) if you don't need to change the program. Also possible to change program with an SD card etc but a bit more work

I found this on Amazon.8-Channel 12V Computer USB Control Switch Relay Module Drive-Free Relay Module Plug and Play Suitable for PC Smart Controller.

Does anybody know how to setup a PC to turn relays off and on at different times and durations?

https://www.amazon.com/NOYITO-8-Chan...80&sr=8-7&th=1

If you were prepared to use Raspberry Pi and the GPIO [output] pins you could control more than 10 relays.
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/...al-computing/1
Using this approach, you'd probably need to do some Python or C programming.

Also, you might find this interesting: https://pirelay.jasonfindlay.com/

Hi Tristar - Look at Duet3d systems. They are modular and can run as many as you like. Peter

https://www.duet3d.com/

Big Tree tech have boards with 8 drives, but I'd probably go duet, very good systems.

https://biqu.equipment/en-au/collect...e-five-motors?

Thanks for all the helpful everybody!
I could use the relay approach but I won't be able to control motor velocity with the simple relay.
I think I'd use the relay system on another sculpture so long as I can get a PC, PLC, etc to run a routine.
I'd like to be able to do something like this but on a much smaller scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlx-M53dC7M

Hi Tri500 - I think you'll need to look at rhino and grasshopper to generate the point data. But once the point data is known the control side is straight fwd...Peter

Planet cnc still has the 9 axis controller. If that's enough, you can use it easy with normal Gcodes axis XYZABCUVW.
I use an old one already for year, but I only have four axis on my mill