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Review on Motor Stepper FeatherWing Feather Boards by Ashwin Chauhan

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Know what you are buying. Please investigate. First look at the specifications. Not at first, and it was good for me.

If you plan to use it for a stepper drive. Electronics design is a kind of hack. It uses an LED driver RBG PWM chip to switch between motor channels. They may not be able to drive stepper motors at the same time. If you just want to manage one at a time, that's fine. This works well when individual motors are turned on individually. Also, the driver is too small to work with most Nema 17 motors. The motor driver is only good up to 1.2 amps. not enough. If you want to use a 12V DC stepper motor, the motor winding resistance must be at least 10 ohms. Bought and tested using adafruit's Stepper Test in the Arduino IDE, and the motor has little torque and jitter. I'll try to use a smaller stepper motor. when they arrive from China. Adafruit doesn't have these smaller motors. I've been trying to start the Nema 17 motor I have and the current is too high, over 9 amps and the driver keeps cutting out with over current due to protection. I ran the motor on 3V DC with 2 AA batteries and the stepper motor works fine. Run the motor at a lower voltage. If I could get this to work with my smartphone app that would be great. A more suitable motor would be a stepper motor, search for Revain "Longruner Nema 17 Bipolar 42mm 37oz.in(26Ncm) 12V 0.4A Lead 3D Printer Hobby CNC 17HS13-0404S" I have no connection to Longrunner. I just looked at the motor data. You should also look at the torque requirements you need.

Pros
  • 2-pin polarity protected terminal block and external power jumper, for separate logic/motor power supplies
Cons
  • old