Stepper Motor Driver 2.0

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Stepper Motor Driver v2.0

This was a prototype stepper motor driver based on the Allegro A3977 stepper motor driver chip. It was intended to be an upgrade to the v1.x series of stepper drivers based on the venerable L297 / L298 combo. The A3977 is cheaper, uses better technology, offers up to 1/16th step, and is cheaper. The downside is that it only comes in PLCC or TSSOP sizes. This board was inspired by and initiated by Lou Amadio in this blog post. Together we collaborated and came up with this prototype board.

You can access the design files on Sourceforge.

The prototype worked, but it had numerous flaws:

  • Unnecessary opto isolation
  • Unnecessary diode bridges
  • The PLCC chip is very hard to solder, even for an SMD chip
  • The board was large, and the routing poor

The first prototype was almost immediately abandoned in favor of the Stepper Motor Driver v2.1.