How to connect a Stepper Motor to Raspberry PLC

Stepper motors are electric motors very useful in the field of lasers and optics they are frequently used in precision positioning equipment such as linear actuators, linear stages, rotation stages, goniometers, and mirror mounts.

Other uses are in packaging machinery and positioning of valve pilot stages for fluid control systems. Or for commercial uses, stepper motors are used for intelligent lighting, camera lenses, CNC machines, or 3D printers, for example.

In this post, we will learn how to connect a stepper motor with the microstep driver to the power supply and the Raspberry Pi based PLC.

A stepper motor, step motor, or stepping motor, is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a full rotation into a number of equal steps.

The motor's position can be commanded to move and hold at one of these steps without any position sensor for feedback (an open-loop controller), as long as the motor is correctly sized to the application in respect to torque and speed. 

Do not confuse it with a servo motor, which is one kind of closed-loop motor that is connected to an encoder to provide speed feedback & position. The motor which moves in discrete steps is known as the stepper motor.

Microstep Drivers apply power to the appropriate step motor winding to produce torque. They precisely divide the current between the motor phases, thus positioning the step motor at smaller increments between full steps. They provide higher resolution but with less torque. Microstepping does not increase step accuracy but will allow a motor to run with less noise, minimize low speed resonance effects and produce smooth rotation over a wide speed range. 

 Now, would you like to know how to make your stepper motor run with an industrial Raspberry Pi PLC?   Know how >