Pololu stepper driver board
- Please note: Pololu stepper driver boards has 0.05 ohm sense resistors instead of StepStick 0.2 ohm.
Pololu driver boards (8+8 pins):
- Pololu A4988 stepper driver - A4988-based; equivalent to A4983-board but offers overcurrent protection. If the boards get too hot, they will interrupt the current until it cools a bit. If the current is too high for the heat sinking, the motors will pulse as the current is interrupted and restored. See http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?4,116813,116832,quote=1 and its video. Try reducing the current until the pulsing stops.
- Pololu A4983 stepper driver - A4983-based; (discontinued).
Pololu driver boards with Voltage Regulators (longer boards - 8+14 pins):
- Pololu A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier with Voltage Regulators - A4988-based; equivalent to A4983-board but offers overcurrent protection.
- Pololu A4983 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier with Voltage Regulators - A4983-based; (discontinued).
As Nophead has pointed out, that Pololu driver is a nice design, but with one big shortcoming: it will run hot, and is difficult to cool because it's so small. So what I've done is to design the electronics in such a way that they both perform their function and act as a physical duct for the flow from a fan to direct their own cooling. A happy side-effect of this is that the resulting PCBs are very simple, and can be made single-sided without any thin tracks. That is is why RepRap itself can make them. We must walk before we can run...
