Can anyone give me a clue as to whether or not it is possible to increase the power handling of any of the microstepping stepper driver circuits available on the web. There are quite a few designs about such as the PIC microstep project based on PIC chips but they are all limited to about 2A per phase. I have a couple of steppers which take about 4.2A per phase that I'd like to hang onto my Harrison Lathe but I can't find an economical way to do so - commercially built units are virtually all outside my available budget at the moment but I have a large stock of various electronic components which I could build from...
As far as I can see, the limiting factor is the current monitoring which always seems to be tied to the output transistors/FETs. The fact that there are no designs published for drives handling currents in excess of 2.5A or so makes me wonder if there is some limiting factor that I don't know about. While I can build circuits and troubleshoot them relatively easily (back in the day, I built an Apple II clone using separate components and wire wrap and it worked!!), I'm no good at designing circuits - guess I've never just got down to learning all the maths... been too busy making things!! So, is there a way I could change the output transistors for higher current devices and just fiddle around with the values of current monitoring resistors or something?? -- Best wishes, Ian ____________ Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK "The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SF.Net email is Sponsored by MIX09, March 18-20, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The future of the web can't happen without you. Join us at MIX09 to help pave the way to the Next Web now. Learn more and register at http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;208669438;13503038;i?http://2009.visitmix.com/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
