controlling 2 stepper motors along x and y axis

I always felt that finding the best way to do something was the most enjoyable part of engineering. I can't imagine why you'd even start a project like that without having some idea of how to do it, let alone asking someone else to come up with the method for you.

A few questions:

• Have you given consideration to maximum stepping speed?

• Are you doing microstepping?

• Is your processor going to be involved in current control of phases?

• What are you doing for a motion profile? Straight-line, trapezoidal, ???

• Is this a free-standing controller that performs one task over and over? Or is this a stepper indexer/controller that accepts commands from another source (DIP switches, another computer)?

• If this is a general indexer, what additional commands shall your controller do?

• Are you making any provision for home, nearly home, or any other positioning signals on one or both axes?

• Do you know what's being asked in the above questions? (If not, you might start by reading Jones on Stepping Motors:
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This is only scratching the surface of the things you're going to have to decide. And as you should know, the processor choice is determined by the project requirements.

On the other hand, I've seen a lot of 8052-based stepper stuff. I've also seen one or two 80186-based stepper controllers. I would guess one axis is very doable with an 8052. Two axes, possibly you might want to go with one of the newer 8052 derivatives, which have higher clock speed, fewer clock cycles per instruction, and more hardware timers (you can never have enough).

Actually, if you look around, you'll probably find a number of free-standing stepper controllers based on any number of processors. This should give you some idea of what kind of features you could provide in your project.

Oh, yes. This is a school project, of course. Is this a trade school or university project, and is this the senior project? And, sadly, when is it due?

Chris

use a parallel port .. you have 8 bit (byte port) that can be used to signal 8 different things.

personally, i would simply make a little USB interface using the HUMAN interface protocol so that you don't need to write drivers for your app.. use some PICS/AVR chips for the X,Y table to perform the logic and communications. etc.. but that's me..