Stepper motors

[mrklempae]

Hello! I was wondering how to program a stepper motor. I've looked through the WpiLib classes, and can't seem to find one for it. We happen to have one for no apparent reason, and I want to make it do something :D Is there such a thing as a stepper motor class? I've looked at the documentation for this (http://adafruit.com/products/858) one (the one we have), but it seems reliant on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi library. Any help would be great! Thanks!

[cgmv123]

While can't help you program the motor, I can help you by reminding you that a stepper motor is not one of the motors legal under [R32].

(If you're (somewhat desperately) wondering whether it counts as a servo, it doesn't. The manufacturer's name for the part is the decider.)

[Kevin Sevcik]

You're somewhat unlikely to run a stepper with an FRC control system. If you really really wanted to, you'd need to wire two speed controllers up to the stepper and then come up with a class that would cycle the speed controllers through a step cycle on command etc, etc. It's really not worth it.

[mrklempae]

Okay thanks! It was for an off-season project, but it's not that important. We can just use a servo motor :P At least there's a class for it.

[DonRotolo]

You're somewhat unlikely to run a stepper with an FRC control system. If you really really wanted to, you'd need to wire two speed controllers up to the stepper and then come up with a class that would cycle the speed controllers through a step cycle on command etc, etc. It's really not worth it.It should also be possible to get a dedicated stepper controller and control it via DIO pins, much like we do with the parallel port of a PC.