Comments on: ITead motorshield in the wild

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 09:35:08 +0000

Just connects the same way as any stepper motor Anu, four stepper wires (for a bipolar motor), four input terminals per motor. This board is nice because it has screw terminals _and_ 2.54mm header pins, you can choose which to use.

By: anurag1932

anurag1932 — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 09:10:26 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for writing up this post. I have been looking for a while for something that explains the product. The only problem i have is understanding how to connect the stepper motors to the device. is it a simple plug and play into the itead?

Kind Regards,

Anu

By: sandy

sandy — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:36:48 +0000

Quality Mark, thanks for adding this info – dead handy.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:46:52 +0000

I suppose a picture is worth a thousand words…

http://www.consortium.plus.com/images/eggbot/IMG_5746.jpg

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:24:19 +0000

Another hardware hack I had to make was to short across the two 10k resistors that are connecting the variable resistors (used to set the stepper driver current) to ground.

With the 10k resistors in place the lowest I can get the vref down to was about 2.4v. The chip is expecting a vref of 1v and above.

I was using this to drive steppers for an eggbot and the steps were way to rough to produce a smooth drawing. Short the 10k resistor (be careful, the pads on the PCB don’t take a lot of heat before they come off the board!) and you have the ability to turn the stepper driver current down even further.

Now I have nice smooth stepping! 🙂

By: sandy

sandy — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:19:23 +0000

That’s brilliant Mark, I guessed there’d be a way to break the pins out, but that’s actually even more straightforward than I thought. I was anticipating having to solder wires to the IC pins. These boards are actually pretty great – all my recent drawings have been with one and I love the quality microstepping.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:44:29 +0000

You can turn the drivers off with a small hack.

The enable pins (pin 14 on the driver chips) are both connected to a resistor. Unsolder the resistor, solder a wire onto the pad that connects to the enable pins, route the other end to a free pin and enable/disable both steppers from software from 1 pin.

By: sandy

sandy — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:55:05 +0000

That’s a good one – hadn’t seen it before, thanks for pointing it out!

By: Oling

Oling — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:48:26 +0000

see this http://jeselectronics.com/?p=682 , maybe helpful?

By: sandy

sandy — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:09:21 +0000

Exactly, AFMotor is required for the Adafruit motorshield only, because it uses a latch to save a couple of pins, it needs a particular way of addressing. This ITead board uses serial stepper drivers, so it already doesn’t use many pins, and doesn’t need any special tricks to use it.