Do you have a vi for controlling a stepper motor with a DAQ

[Home 281]

I have two steppermotors that I need to control with a multifuntional DAQ. I have a motor controller that Will control two motors through a parallel port. I would like to cut the parallel port wire and tie this in to the DAQ, THis will allow me to control the motors with the DAQ. Do you have any suggestions for this, or do you have any sample vi code that would help

[Sastry V.]

Hi,

You can take a look at the following link.

Motion Control

Sincerely,
Sastry Vadlamani
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Brent_R]

This depend on what type of stepper drive you have. Some drives that connect to the serial or parallel port receive commands like "go to position X" in the form of a string. The drive interprets the command and generates the appropriate pusles for the motor.

Stepper drives that are designed to interface with an external controller typically receive the motor control pulses directly on lines that will be labeled Step/Dir or CW/CCW.

If your drive fits in the first category and accepts commands from the serial port, then you are probably much better off staying with this interface and just sending the appropriate commands from LabVIEW.

If your drive does accept Step/Dir or CW/CWW signals, then you could use the counters on the MIO board or even the analo
g output (manually create pulse train) to control the motor. This type of control is fairly tedious. The easiest way to do this would be to use the NI 7334.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Brent R.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments