Control 8 levers via stepper motors

I am looking for suggestions primarily for motor controllers.

I need to control 8 levers, programatically setting them in a sequence of different combinations of up and down. Max torque is 200 oz-in, holding torque is 100 oz-in. Motor should spin at around 10 revolutions per second. I was thinking of using 8 stepper motors like 23HS8430 Nema23 Stepper Motor. I need to load a sequence of 1000 instructions where each instruction will simultaneously move each lever to its position for that instruction (up = 0 or down = 1500 degrees of rotation), and then manually trigger the next instructions via a forward switch/button or trigger the previous instruction via a back switch/button. Thus two inputs or one input with two states.

The CNC or D printer motor controller boards I have looked at (e.g. Octopus V1.1 with F446 chip) seem like they do more than I need, and most seem to use Mach 3 software which does more than I need. If I could control this all from a Raspberry Pi or something similar, or if it were self contained, that would be better than controlling it from a computer.

Any suggestions on a suitable motor controller (or suggestions on any other aspects of this project) would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi @gorzog63 and welcome to our forum.

Here is one potential solution.

For each stepper motor, you could use this Pololu Tic 36v4 USB Multi-Interface Stepper Motor Controller (Soldered):

What is good is that you can communicate with this driver board via I2C.

Now, you could use Raspberry Pi 4 as a microcontroller, and then find a way to connect all of these driver boards to RPi I2C bus. Maybe you could use I2C multiplexer like this one:

In general, you can find online some explanations on how to connect multiple I2C devices to RPI.