Driver for 5-phase stepper motor pentagon connection with dedicated ICs

Stepper motors are very well suited for positioning applications since they can achieve very good positional accuracy without complicated feedback loops associated with servo systems. In this paper, an intelligent five-phase stepper motor driver of business card size proposed. Constant current chopping technique was applied for the purposes of high torque, high velocity and high efficiency. The driver was designed to drive a middle-sized hybrid stepper motor with wire current rating from 0.7 to 1.4A. An up-to-dated translator of five-phase stepping motor was used to drive the gates of N- channel MOSFET (Low side N-channel MOSFET Array) and level shift for NPN Darlington transistor (High side PNP Darlington transistor). The resolution in full/half mode is 0.72/0.36 degrees/step. Moreover, an automatic power down circuit was used to limit the power consuming as the motor stops. Additionally, a self-testing program embedded in an 80C31-CPU (PCL838) can self-test whether the driver is normal or not. This embedded program including linear acceleration and deceleration routines also can serve as a positioning controller. The dimension of this driver is approximate 90x70x40 millimeters, which is smaller than a business card. Experimental results demonstrate that the responses of the driver can reach 60 kilo pulses per second.