Hello,
I am having some problems with my stepper motor setup, and would like to get some feedback.
We recently purchased a peristaltic pump with a stepper motor from welco.net. The stepper motor is bipolar and has 4 wires leading to it.
Upon arrival, it became clear that the pump wouldn't start working on itself, and we would need a way to control it via a PC.
That lead us to probotix.com, from where we purchased a SideStep driver, which should be able to connect to the pump motor and a PC and let us control the pump.
Now that we have the driver here as well, I am still confused about the whole thing. I have a 24VDC power supply, which I can hook up to the driver, and I am pretty certain I have the motor hooked up to the driver as well, but what is confusing me is the connection to the PC. The probotix support told me that it is possible to use the driver for computer-controlling the stepper motor, but I haven't been able to get more feedback from them.
The PBX header (which is described in the pdf user manual) should give me all the wiring I need to connect to the PC. I can understand the use of STEP, DIRECTION and ENABLE pins, but the GROUND and +5VDC connectors I am not sure about. If I were to connect the PBX pins to a parallel port cable, I could use EMC2, for example, to set the respective pins to step, direction and enable, but what should I do with the +5VDC and GROUND pins? Can I get +5VDC and ground from the parallel port, or will I need some additional hardware?
Thanks in advance,
Steven.