Drive stepper motor from Pi

Question

I am looking to drive THIS stepper motor from the raspberry pi. I have successfully followed THIS tutorial to get the small stepper motor used in the tutorial working correctly. I am using the L293D for the driver.

I tried switching out stepper motors (the smaller for the larger one mentioned at the beginning of this post) since the tutorial only used four wires to control the small stepper motor with the L293D I figured this would work with the larger motor. It did actually move for about 1 second and then it stopped moving now neither the small motor or large motor will function anymore.

I am guessing I burned up the L293D since I believe its only rated for something like 600mA per channel and according to the specs on the larger stepper it uses 1.5A. Is this the most likely cause for neither of them working anymore?

What would be the proper and easiest way to control the larger stepper motor from the Raspberry Pi?

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

It does sound like the most likely explanation is indeed that the L293D overheated when trying to drive the larger stepper.

We make a small control board called PicoBorg which is rated for 2A and is capable of driving a single 5-wire or 6-wire stepper motor, perfectly suited for driving your larger stepper motor.

The specification, FETs used and circuit diagram can be found here.

The example software provided here includes code for driving stepper motors, with a short explanation here, and even a practical use example called FedPet.