[TriEmbed] Stepper Motors

[Rodney Radford]

In addition, there is builtin thermal protection on the device so if it
really gets too hot, it will shut down to protect itself.  Since you are
not seeing that, it should be within safe operating mode.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Rodney Radford <ncgadgetry at gmail.com>
wrote:

> There is already an ENABLE line as input to the 4988 that you can use to
> turn off the driver outputs to the stepper motors.  Just set this signal to
> HIGH to disable the outputs.
>
> By hot, how hot do you define hot?  If you were to wet the tip of your
> finger and place it on the IC, could you hold it there?  If not, it may be
> running too hot due to motors pulling too much current.  You may be able to
> add a heat sink to the top to dissipate some of that heat, or you may have
> to look for a different controller or smaller motors.
>
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 3:30 PM, Grawburg <grawburg at myglnc.com> wrote:
>
>> My bipolar stepper from  printer works fine with the A4988 control board
>> (and Pololu wasn't kidding when they said it can get hot). I realize that
>> one of the advantages of a stepper is that it holds position waiting to
>> actually do something.  But that means my motor does get hot in idle when I
>> actually don't care if it moves.  I was thinking about using transistors as
>> switches between the A4988 and the motor that I will control from my
>> Raspberry Pi. (They're more fun that using a couple of simple toggle
>> switches.)
>>
>> My question concerns issues with the A4988 and cycling the power from the
>> it to the motor.  Would I be better of putting the transistors between the
>> power supply (12 VDC) and A4988?
>>
>>
>> Brian Grawburg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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