Rohm plugs stepper motor drive design into Arduino

Rohm Semiconductor has developed an evaluation kit for motor driver devices which is designed as a ‘shield’ to plug directly into the Arduino open source board.

There different versions of the kit for the supplier’s various stepper motor driver ICs– from standard, micro step, low voltage to high voltage.

It covers supply voltages from 8V to 42V, enables up to 2.5A per phase, as well as micro-stepping and single- or multi-phase control of one or two stepper motors. It drives with CLK-IN or PARA-IN variants.

The evaluation kits can be stacked so that a second shield can be added on top to drive two motors.

Gerber-based PCB layouts that are provided as well.

According to the Rohm, in the design of stepper motor drives, engineers have to consider “various aspects such as speed, vibration, performance optimisation and the choice of the devices and support tools is critical to both.”