How to know if your Stepper is what you need.

[Lammy2004]

Hej there,

First, I would like to thank the Adafruit-team for this amazing experience. You are responsible for bringing ideas to life all around the globe :)

My questions concerns the Adafruit Motorshield v2.

I am building a DrawBot/ Polargraph based on an Arduino Uno + Adafruit Motorshield and two steppers.
When I bought components somebody offered my two Sanyo Denki 103h7123-0740. None of the projects I saw on the net really discussed the questions of how to select the right stepper, so I went for it. Now as it turns out, they are way more powerful than they need to be. As I understood from the data sheets of this motor it runs at 3 A and uses a source voltage of 24V. The motor shield is not designed to provide this much. Will it be an issue, since I do not plan to put heavy loads on the motor? The two motors are only pulling a 200g max weight (probably even less).

My questions now is, what would be the optimal power supply for the Adafruit motorshield when running this motor? Can a safely select a 12V/5A supply, like this: https://www.adafruit.com/products/352

Thanks for your help and happy weekend from Denmark.

[adafruit_support_bill]

I looked up the electrical specifications for your motor, and it does not appear to be compatible with the V2 motor shield. Although it is rated for 3A/Phase and 24v, it has a very low winding resistnace of 0.77 ohms/phase. This means that it is designed for a constant-current or "chopper" driver. If you were to power it at 12v with a constant voltage driver such as the Motor Shield V2, the motor would try to pull more than 15 A which would not be good for either the motor or the shield.

https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-st ... he-stepper

The Synthetos drivers we have in the store are chopper-type drives and would be suitable for those motors. https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=synthetos&b=1

Or, perhaps a better match for your project requirements would be these motors, which work well with the V2 motor shield: https://www.adafruit.com/products/324