I m making a 2 axis robot which will dispense sealant on a specefied contour. for this we are using two stepper motors so can any one tell me how can i interface my pc with stepper motor. I have done my software part in matlab, so can any one guide me on this. How microcontroller will help in this project? please throw some light too on it.

 

Hi,

First of all you have to build a power converter drive for your motors. If they are unipolar steppers then you need a unipolar drive or bipolar drive. So that the input is a 5V TTL. Once this is done you can use MATLAB to access the parallel ports through MATPORT from NTPORT (http://www.zealsoftstudio.com/ntport/download.html)
This will help you.

As far as microcontroller is concerned then see that you dont have lot of computations to do, since an 8-bit microcontroller may not be very useful, hoever a 16-bit microcontroller ould be very helpful, since doing harware control is easier on microcontrollers and also doing computations can be fine.. The microcontroller I have used is PIC18F452 from Microchip (http://www.microchip.com) and the programmers for this are easily available and also the C18 C compiler.

Regards,
Abhinav Kalamdani.
Email: [email protected]