[Swede]

There is a thread down in the IC engine hobby section in which i described my CNC coilwinder, which is a nice piece of hardware, not-so-nice driver section (2 Ramsey kit stepper-motor drives) and the real effort, the software, which I custom wrote to deal with the Ramsey drivers peculiar needs. The software has sweet acceleration, ramping, and was written exactly for the hardware.

Well I decided to resurrect the project, and smoked the Ramsey drivers with excess voltage. Now I need to replace them with something more suitable and modern.

The software prints to the parallel port. I can probably edit the software to deal with a new set of drivers, so what I am asking this august assembly of CNC genius is this... I need a light, 2-axis stepper driver system which works on a pretty fundamental basis, basically I tell it to move clockwise a step, it does it, etc. The steppers are 4-wire (bipolar, I think? I know more about servos), from 5.25" floppy drives, and draw about 250 mA each. I need to retain these tiny steppers because they fit the machine.

So, in a nutshell, 1A or less bipolar stepper drivers, 2 axis, which can be connected to a parallel, serial, or USB port. Any suggestions? HELP! I am sick at seeing all this work go to waste.

I can buy more Ramsey drivers, but they require the old, standard parallel port, they cannot deal with EPP and other exotic ports. I had to drag an old PC out of the attic to get it to work at all, then proceeded to destroy it. D'oh!

[anoel]

I did not have any luck finding any cheap Bipolar drives...

But... there are several dual stepper drive kits from places like http://www.alltronics.com

I've got several 5.25" floppy drives with 5 wire steppers that work well in my tests. If you are interested in going the Unipolar route I'd be more than happy to part with a pair of motors.

[kong]

A quick trip to google revealed this one:
http://www.geocities.com/iecmaster/m...pper_info.html
i know nothing about these though, so could be a waste of time?

edit - actually, on second viewing, I don't even see a parallel port on the schematic!

[John S.]

Try,
http://www.xylotex.com
Single axis bipolar microstepping drives in 3 axis and single axis configurations.

John S.

[Swede]

Thanks guys, I'll take a look at all of these. If I need to go unipolar, I guess it shouldn't be a big deal. The guts of the machine, and the software, are the areas which tool all of the effort.

Swede

[anoel]

Swede, Check yer email