Hi
I think the next revision of the EasyDriver PCB should have the ability to set the micro stepping to full, half or quarter, not just one eighth.
The reason for this is motor speed, if you have less steps per revolution you can put in a lower frequency to get a better top speed from the motor.
It can be easily done by adding solderable jumper pads near pins 12 and 13 of the chip, maybe with 10k pull-ups to keep the same default of 1/8 step, and you would only have to make a solder bridge or two to change the divisions.
To make things even easier it could have mini switches, but this would affect the cost more and would probably take up more room.
Any comments?
There is a new version of the EasyDriver (called the v4) that is in the works right now - prototype boards should be arriving in a few weeks. It has several nice improvements - like ground pins for both the motor connector and the step/direction connector,and LEDs for Motor Power, +5 power, Step and Direction. It also has every I/O pin of the driver chip brought out to pads. In order to stay in the same general footprint as the ED V3, I couldn’t bring them out to pins, but there is the opportunity to change that before V4 goes into production. It would mean adding 6 more pins to the design, which would reduce the heat sinking ability of the top and bottom copper pours. Is that a tradeoff you’d like to see?