We are in the design phase of a new drive that will be a follow up to our most popular drives ever, the G250X and the G251X. We are designing around an ice5 FPGA and a new ultra-efficient MOSFET and gate driver pair that will let the drive run up to 50VDC and 7A, doubling the power of the current G250X and G251X. These new components are so efficient that the drive won’t need heatsinking at any current. Right now the features we will be including are:

12 - 50VDC and 100mA - 7A continuous operating power (10V dropout)
14 selectable resolutions, from half step to 256 microstep
Small size: 1” x 2” board size, or roughly the same surface area as the G251X
Split 3.5mm connectors in a similar setup as the G214 connectors
An onboard DIP switch for current and resolution setting
Razor thin: The MOSFETs on the bottom are only 1mm thick, meaning the drive will be ~1/2” thick in total

After we have these initial requirements laid out on the board we can add features that will fit. Our interest in this is twofold: to out-engineer the competition and to out-price the competition. The GR252 will be the first in our Raptor Series, quickly followed up by the GR214 with cool-running MOSFETs and performance improvements. Following those releases we plan on creating a family of drives, such as a header based variant that is meant to be plugged into a larger motherboard like the G250X currently does.

And now for the kicker: The price of this drive will be low. Like super low. We are shooting for a $30 price in OEM quantity and a single-unit price of under $60. The drive will still come with our free technical support, free 3-year warranty, and will be manufactured in California like the rest of our products. In order to get these out in the field as quickly as possible we plan on selling the first 250 of them for $15, with a limit of two per customer.

I will be giving design updates on here as this thing moves along. This will be a whirlwind of a design, and we are hoping to move on to prototyping and beta testing quickly.

We want to know what you need in a step motor drive. While we are in the design phase we can incorporate as many customer requested features as possible, so let us know what you want to see.