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© 2016 ROHM Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.
STEPMO_EVK_20x
Evaluation Board Manual
EUDC59-U-002 - Rev. 1.3
2. Introduction
This evaluation
board manual describes the usage of ROHM’s stepper motor driver IC evaluation kit (EVK) called
STEPMO_EVK_20x. The purpose of the EVK is to allow the test and evaluation of the stepper driver IC in professional research and
development environments. It is designed as a plug-in board (Shield) for popular Arduino microcontroller platform. This document
provides guidelines to quickly setup the hardware and software for fast and easy stepper motor driver IC performance evaluation.
For further details about the motor driver ICs and other ROHM products, please also consult the relevant product datasheets and
general information at
http://www.rohm.com
.
The EVK provided by ROHM consists of hardware and software. This document refers to hardware revision 1605.
Please check
http://www.rohm.com/web/eu/arduino-stepper-motor-shield
for downloading additional useful information such as
application notes, Gerber files, schematics, bill of materials, software libraries, example programs etc.
For operation of the EVK an Arduino motherboard is required. For all tests and performance evaluation by ROHM the EVK has been
used together with an Arduino Uno R3 motherboard.
Arduino (also Genuino) is an open-source electronics microcontroller platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software.
The concept of Arduino includes a defined IO and Power pinning which allows the easy connection of daughter application boards
into the microcontroller mother board. These plug-in boards are also called Shields. The microcontroller programs created using the
Arduino IDE are called Sketches. For more information about Arduino please visit
https://www.arduino.cc/
.
Of course, the EVK hardware can be operated with any other microcontroller platform if desired if this is preferred for evaluation of
the IC performance. For this case the required information about the necessary IO and power signals is also provided within this
document.
2.1 Block Diagram
A block diagram of the EVK hardware is depicted in Figure 1. The motor voltage applied to screw terminal J6 is also the supply for
the motor driver IC. For single supply operation a Buck regulator creates a 7V input voltage for the Arduino motherboard (Vin) which
again uses this voltage to create the logic supplies of 5V/3.3V. Therefore it is not necessary to power the microcontroller board
separately. The 5V created by the Arduino motherboard is used by the EVK to supply logic blocks and voltage levels to configure the
stepper motor driver IC.
The EVK is designed to be stackable to allow evaluating two stepper driver ICs at the same time. For this purpose the Jumper J1 is
used to configure the board from Master (default, used for the first Shield) and Slave (only used for a second stacked Shield). As
Slave the Buck Regulator is turned off with high impedance output because the Vin Voltage is already generated by the Master
Shield.
Based on the setting of J1 the control signals for the motor driver IC are routed via multiplexers to different Arduino IOs to allow
independent motor drive. The Master or Slave configuration is indicated by an LED (Master: green, Slave red).
The screw terminal J7/J8 allows the connection of a 4-wire bipolar or a 5-to-6-wire unipolar stepper motor.
Figure 1: EVK Shield Block Diagram
