Stepper Motor Control

[bfarley]

I am looking to control a stpper motor. Can I do this without any additional hardware?. What I would like is to drive the motors from a laptop using serial or GPIB, without a separate controller. Can you buy motor/controller combos like this?

Thanks,
Bill F

[JLS]

Hello,

If your stepper motor has an RS-232 standard serial port that provides an interface to control it, you should be able to use the RS-232 standard serial port on your computer to communicate with the stepper motor and will not require additional hardware. If your stepper motor has a GPIB interface on it, you will need a GPIB inteface/controller in order to communicate with it. For this (given you would like to use a laptop) I can recommend an NI PCMCIA-GPIB card or a GPIB-USB-B device (if you have an available USB port). What you will need to control your motor depends entirely on the interface(s) provided by your motor to control it.

Thank you,

JLS