Stepper motor driver with less noise?

Another note.

I think the switch in my design was driven by something that was effectively a D or J-K flip flop (though there were two of them inside an integrated dual H bridge chip), clocked at the peak of the sawtooth clock waveform, with the D or J and reset driven by the current comparator. So each clock period, if the comparator showed current below reference, the clock edge would start a power pulse, and when the comparator showed the current above the reference, the reset would terminate the pulse, and that decision was irrevocable till the next clock edge began another pulse. The clock circuit consisted of an external RC, in parallel to ground with a fast charge and an RC time constant discharge. I added a bit of that waveform to the current reference input to make the sawtooth version of the current reference.

I wasn't micro stepping the driver, but operating in half step mode. I also varied the average reference level between two different values, depending on whether one or two windings were being powered to produce a uniform break away torque, regardless. This took a lot of rotational torsional vibration out of the rotation.

Reply to
John Popelish
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At what power level ? A current low noise microstepping design of mine employs a pair of linear audio fullbridges. Since the rotational speed as well as the torque is close to zero, a single chip stereo amp that can be operated DC coupled was choosen as optimal solution.

Rene

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Reply to
Rene Tschaggelar

About five watts. We can't go linear because of battery operation. Every milliwatt counts. We'll just roll our own PWM, then there will be peace and quiet, plus one less part to buy for the purchasing guys ;-)

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Regards, Joerg

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Reply to
Joerg

Nice idea. I naively started out thinking these motors were just like a DC motor except they stepped. Little realising that any number of techniques and 'approaches' can make a world of difference to their performance. Once I'd moved from full to half to micro step, there was no turning back :)

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Reply to
john jardine

The extension of my current modulation scheme to micro-stepping would be to include a map of torque versus position per amp for your particular motor design, to approximately unravel the nonlinearities of the magnetic structure. Stepper motors are not very good sine wave generators. They have all sorts of cogging (salient poles) and harmonic factors in their operation.

Reply to
John Popelish

One method to improve the situation is to minimize the noise coming from the motor but that requires somewhat luxurious software handles for tweaking. Ideally the motor should just release a very faint hiss, not the usual "eeeep". However, once they asked me to introduce some "eeeep" again because they wanted acoustic feedback indicating that it's turning. Shook my head but did it. The client's wishes must be my wishes ...

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
Reply to
Joerg

That sounds like a problem with your software. ;-)

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
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Michael A. Terrell

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