Help finding a control system to operate 13 stepper motors independently. Hopefully can be same system for NEMA 23 motors and NEMA 36 motors and even DC or Servo kind but if only for NEMA 23 Steppers that will be fine for now. Require the control board, drivers, and software to operate all motors at the same time and independently so not in master slave config or something. There are some out there but they are super expensive at over $5000 USD. Does anyone know of anything or a company to look for or even a forum to try to post to. Looked at CNC stuff but they only have 3 to 6 motors possible. Thanks.
I don’t think there is a off-the-shelf control board to drive that many steppers, but you can buy individual drivers(e.g. TB6600) for your stepper motors, the tricky part is that you have to provide control pulses to these drivers; if you don’t need precise synchronization between motors, an Arduino Mega might be enough, but if you want more precise timing, you should look into some ARM based board with realtime kernel, or implement your control system in FPGA.
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We have an Arduino Mega with the expander but we have tried to run from Pronterface but of course could not get enough software controls to work with that many motors. We do need precise sync with all motors and a nice way to control them although you may mean something else by “precise”. It really surprises me that there is no cheap and easy solution. I would think there are tons of projects out there that require many motors to be run and controlled.
I think it might be possible to control your motors with the Mega using the AccelStepper library, but sending commands to that many motors trough serial might be a bottleneck if you want to control them as fast as possible.
Can I ask, what are you trying to build from that many stepper motor?