Stepper Motor with Labview?

[ewrankend]

I am new to LabVIEW.

I am planning to develop a project to control a stepper motor using an NI-DAQ, and Labview, but I am not sure how practical this approach is. My goal is to create a single interface that performs both data acquisition and stepper motor control at the same time. Is this feasible using only a DAQ and the necessary motor drivers, without needing to use a microcontroller?

[rolfk]

From Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LabVIEW/comments/1ton3o4/stepper_motor_with_labview/

As mentioned there already, it's not really detailed enough to make a good statement about this. The mentioning of DAQ in combination with stepper motor control is hopefully just a red herring. If you really intend to use a DAQ card to generate the control signals for the stepper motor driver, you should probably have a least a solid electrical engineering degree first. 

If the mentioned motor driver is an intelligent device connected through USB/serial/ethernet, then it sure would be possible but without more details that is as much as I would dare to say.

[Bob_Schor]

---

@ewrankend wrote:

I am planning to develop a project to control a stepper motor using an NI-DAQ, and Labview, but I am not sure how practical this approach is. My goal is to create a single interface that performs both data acquisition and stepper motor control at the same time. Is this feasible using only a DAQ and the necessary motor drivers, without needing to use a microcontroller?

---

The basic answer is "Yes, and I've done it" (but the Bad News is I recently moved and haven't gotten my LabVIEW project files re-installed).  Here, however, are some basic "How to get started" tips.

I'm assuming you are using a small NEMA stepper motor.  You mentioned Motor Drivers, so I'm assuming you know about the A4988 chip that can be used (along with a suitable power supply) to control the motor.  Indeed, if you ask Google about "stepper motor driver boards", you'll find the A4988 for a very reasonable price, along with videos showing how to connect it with an Arduino.  So all we need to do is substitute "a DAQ" (whatever you mean by this) for the Arduino, write some DAQmx code for producing the logic levels and pulse trains you need and you'll be off to the races.

Bob Schor