What I meant to say is that you do need motor drivers, the outputs of the parport will not let you draw any current (that is of use for stepper motors). You can draw 10, if you're lucky even 25, mA from the parport directly so to control the stepper motors you will need a driver.
Why does everyone immediately think of (expensive) microstepper drivers when "motor drivers" is mentioned. As I also wrote, an IRF7402 FET will do nicely for lower currents. They are my standard part to control these high power Luxeon/Seoul LEDs at 350 mA. The Ron is 0.022 Ohm and power dissipation 2.5W so they can handle nice currents if cooled a bit and they only cost me about € 0.40 each and Jim already wrote he will use a schottky diode (1N5819 @ € 0.15) so building a stepper motor driver can be real cheap. But looking in your junk-box you'll may find some old 2N3055 transistors, they'll also do the trick at the cost of a little more power consumption. Building a motor driver in this way will not get the most out of your motor, it does not use any current/voltage control like sophisticated controllers but this will defenitely get you going with a simple setup. I have been building robots using Fisher Technik this way when I was a kid. 'Was' ??? I still feel a kid some days when I am allowed to play with these nice CNC tools :-D Regards, Rob > bingo! > > > > >You do have motor drivers? There is no way you can control them > directly > >from the parport. > > > > > Actually, you can. I didn't look at the step types, but there are two > types of direct 4-phase drive: full-stepping and half-stepping. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
