[BJM737]

Recently bought the attached stepper motor pulse signal generator, have got it to work but not as well as I would like. Has anyone had any experience with this? If so any suggestions?

Thanks

[Jim Dawson]

What problems are you having? I have used one, they work OK if you start with the pot at its lowest setting then ramp up the speed. If you just start the motor with the pot at mid range or higher, many times the motor will try to accelerate instantly to the set speed and just decouple and sit there and growl at you.

[BJM737]

Yes we are having the same issue in that it doesn't want to start at any setting other than low, then when we get near a decent seed the pot is very sensitive to small changes. Is there something better out there that we might use, all we want to do is have some decent control over the speed of the stepper motor? Thanks for the reply and any suggestions.

[Jim Dawson]

One thing that helped was to put a resistor across the center and one other leg of the pot connection, but I can't remember if I used a 1K, 5K, or 10K resistor. This gave the pot a little better mid range, less sensitive.

If you added a RC network to the timer start circuit it would do a slow start and accelerate the motor at a reasonable rate. I don't have one of those controllers here to play with so can't be too much help.

You might Google 555 timer circuits, I think they used one or something similar in that controller.

[BJM737]

Thanks....