uStepper Controller Board

About

A neodymium magnet attached to the back of the motor shaft, with a magnetic encoder chip, allow for north/south pole tracking of the magnet. With this information, the angle of the stepper motor shaft can be determined. The encoder has a 12bit resolution, so the shaft position can be tracked in steps of 1/4096, this corresponds to a resolution of 0.088 degrees. Because the magnet and encoder chips are fixed, the measured shaft angle will not be reset during power cycles. This enables the uStepper controller to have the ability to perform closed loop regulation of the stepper motor position with a sample frequency as high as 6.6kHz.

Many applications use RC Servos for their actuators, uStepper with it's rotary encoder can replace RC Servos with no mechanical wear that can effect the measured position.

The uStepper has a huge amount of I/O pins available, this allows it to be expanded in so many ways! SPI, UART and I2C interfaces are all available, with the I2C already having the required pull-up resistors.

12 I/O pins are available for expansions, 2 can be used for external interrupts, and 6 can generate PWM Signals. In addition 4 analog pins are available, allowing the processing of external analogue signals using the ADC feature of the microcontroller.