Dilshan R Jayakody’s Web Log

This is an experimental stepper motor driver for Celestron CG-4 German equatorial mounts . This unit is functionally equivalent to the Celestron dual-axis motor driver , and we developed it as a replacement unit for the original Celestron driver. The prototype circuit board of the motor controller unit. The core component of this motor driver is PIC16F88 8-bit MCU. This MCU is responsible for driving two motors and scanning the user inputs. As an original unit, this system also got a clock driver for the right ascension (RA) axis. This system uses two L293 motor drivers to drive the right ascension (RA) axis and declination (DEC) axis motors. This unit is designed to work with 6V bipolar stepper motors, which include in the telescope mount. The LM350 voltage regulator is used to maintain power to both stepper motors. Internal view of the prototype enclosure. This replacement motor drive provides all the functionalities of the original unit, which including manu...

This article describe the LMD18245 and PIC16F877A base 16 step bipolar stepper motor driver which is design to work with 12V 18 º bipolar stepper motors. In this design we use pair of LMD18245 DMOS full bridge motor drivers to control 2 phases of the stepper motor and PIC16F877A MCU is used as controller. We test this driver with several stepper motors (including 1.8 º - 12V stepper motors) and all of them provide excellent smooth output with this driver. The supplied firmware of this driver is design for 16 micro-steps but it can be easily change to full-step, half-step, 8, 32 or 40 micro-steps. In this given design LMD18245 current sense resistor is calculated for 200mA and it can be extend to 3A by changing the value of R2 and R4 resistors. For more information refer the LMD18245 datasheet . This project is released as open hardware project. Firmware of this project is released under the terms of MIT License and schematic is released under the terms of Creative Commons ...