Driving two NEMA17 Steppers (12V, 1.2A per phase) with Pololu A4988 drivers. CPU is ATmega128 running external crystal at 16MHz. Connection setup is in A4988. Most of the stepper motors you’ll find in RepRaps and other 3D printers are based on the Allegro A498X series of stepper motor drivers, whether they’re on breakout boards like ‘The Pololu. Allegro MicroSystems, LLC. Offers an industry-leading portfolio of motor driver and controller ICs for brushless DC, brush DC, and stepper motors. Product architectures vary from highly-efficient internal DMOS drivers to MOSFET controller ICs suited for a wide variety of motor applications.
$begingroup$The stepper motor driver based on the Allegro A4988 (also A4983) has a lot of problems with temperature. It is getting very hot and stops to work. And it is difficult to set up with the potentiometer. When the current is too high, driver gets hot and steps get lost. When current is too low, there might not be enough power and steps get lost as well. Are there any alternatives to this A4983?
3 Answers
$begingroup$There are many companies who do do dedicated chips for stepper drivers. The A4988 has a step+dir digital interface. If that's what you want, then you could for example use the Texas Instruments' DRV8825
I was myself looking at different ways of interfacing stepper motors (not just step+dir), and made a comparison table of stepper motor drivers.
I also have the a4988 stepper drivers and am running into the same problems as you are, so I am very interested in finding alternatives.
This won't answer your question but maybe will help alleviate the quirks of the a4988. I have found that attaching small heat sinks (such as these) and putting a fan across them helps with the overheating.
One could also imagine attaching a peltier cooling system to them in order to further alleviate the heat dissipation problem.
Pololu also has the 'Black edition' of the a4988 which has 4 layers instead of the normal 2 and supposedly gives it better heat dissipation. I haven't used this myself.
Good luck
$endgroup$Allegro Motor Driver For Mac
$begingroup$Ive used the L6474 and it runs terrible hot too. It seems manufacturers are trying to make the chips smaller to impress each other, but they would work better if they were bigger. The L6207 L6208 ran very cool.
Comments are closed.