Running steppers from a L293D board

Hi guys

I tried figuring out how to get my newly bought stepper driver board, similar to Adafruit's to work with Firefly and especially the Quad stepper. Unfortunately, they are not really compatible and with quite some searching, the only proposal of how to get it to work was to write your own sketch for the Arduino..

So that's what I've done and thought it would be better to share it with the community. The solution is a bit of stitching together the Adafruit sketch, AFmotor and the Firefly Quad Stepper Sketch. It's probably possible to reduce somewhat, but it works for now and I have also added the servo functionality for the board.

It's using the 1st and 2nd motor input for the steppers and the 3rd and 4th for the servos.

I've edited the component to correspond with the new functions but I don't know whether that's possible to easily upload?

Anyway, here's the sketch for anyone interested :)

Attachments:

Firefly_MotorBoard.ino, 9 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on September 29, 2014 at 7:57am

Thanks Andreas. I don't currently own a L293D driver but will try to test out your code once I do. Thanks for the contribution! You mentioned you had also modified the component. If you'd like, you can forward that to my email (andyopayne@gmail.com) and I'll have a look.

Cheers,

Andy

Permalink Reply by Andreas Bested on October 1, 2014 at 2:09pm

Sure, just copy-paste the content into the your script and it should work :)

Attachments:

L293D MotorBoard.txt, 35 KB

Permalink Reply by Juan Sepulveda on November 5, 2014 at 3:57am

Hi Andreas,

So it worked for you? I need to drive 4 stepper motors and I've been trying with the Adafruit Motor Shield v2.3 but so far no success, but if it worked for you I may get the L293D drivers, thanks!

Permalink Reply by Andreas Bested on November 5, 2014 at 4:15am

I haven't tested it with more than one stepper motor as of yet. But the board can only run two steppers, not four..

Permalink Reply by Juan Sepulveda on November 5, 2014 at 4:28am

Oh ok, then in my case it wouldn't work... I'm thinking now in getting a sparkfun quadstepper driver, have you tried that one with firefly? thanks

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