Parallel stepper motor drivers

clemen2

Hi

I have a Sherline stepper motor driver (controls 4 steppers) that runs my Sherline cnc mill.· I run·it with·EMC·software through the parallel port of a PC.· ·I would like to be able to·control this driver with a propeller chip but I don't have any specs on how the parallel port talks to the driver.· I assume this is pretty standard stuff, but I haven't been able to find anything on it.· Any ideas?

Thanks

Ale

With the help of a logic analyzer, you can find easily how this works. As it is sort of low speed, you can make yourself a logic analyzer with te propeller (sampling can be as fast as... well several MHz), and print all that data to a VGA monitor or TV set... that will give you an idea

Nick Mueller

> I assume this is pretty standard stuff, but I haven't been able to find anything on it. Any ideas?

Normaly, you do have a DIR and a STEP signal for each motor. Thing remaining is finding out the pins.

DIR selects the direction.
STEP is a pulse for each step the stepper has to do. Watch out for the highest frequency possible, the controller won't do buffering.


Nick

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The DIY Digital-Readout for mills, lathes etc.:
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Gavin

EMC and other CNC programs like TurboCNC, Mach3 use the use the printer port to provide the step and direction signals to the stepper motor drivers..

Your Sherline EMC D25 printer connection will be like this,
http://www.sherline.com/8760pg.htm

The propeller needs to provide the step pulses at rates that allow for accelaration, max velocity and distance.
There have been a few forums on this and even a few objects.

Gavin