I am looking for a “test-stand” for stepper-drivers and stepper motors. Basically a pcb with a socket for the typically “pololu”-drivers and connectors for the motor and some potentiometer / knob-thing to adjust speed and direction. No “brain” or any other super fancy stuff needed.
Will “any generic” on ebay will do or can you recommend a specific type bc of some reason?
Example: https://www.reprap.me/easy-stepper.html
It’s all the same I think. The stepper driver does all the hard work. Only thing I would check is the rating of the capacitor. You can just as easily drive it with a 555 timer.
/follow
The knob is probably an encoder, not a potentiometer. At least, that would make the job of controlling a stepper driver a lot easier. Unless it’s a speed controller and there’s a 555 timer in there somewhere…
I’ve always just used a printer controller for this. At Deezmaker, I lasercut a test stand with 4 motors and used a printer controller (I think I had one with a fried MOSFET, so it couldn’t be used for a printer anyway, but an obsolete board or one of the ~$20 chinese single-board RAMPS clones would work) and just programmed it with code that would spin the motors back and forth. I wired the power to the stepper drivers through a button (a repurposed endstop switch) so that I could swap drivers without powering down the whole rig and restarting the program. This let me test drivers four at a time with minimal delays.
I use a Ramps controller to test motors, using Pronterface as the control interface. Works like a charm.
