Hi, everyone. I’m running into an issue integrating the ROB-13656 stepper motor, the Big Easy Driver, Arduino, and AccelStepper.
I was able to set up the Big Easy Driver and stepper motor, and I was able to run the example scripts supplied on the SparkFun website. I could successfully advance the motor forward and backward and microstep. I was able to turn the potentiometer so the motor could draw up to 1.8 A on my power supply.
However, I ran into trouble when beginning to use AccelStepper, which I was using because I wanted to run the motor at a constant slow velocity and then accelerate slowly. When I ran the ConstantSpeed example script, the motor sputtered for a second and then stopped turning altogether. When I went back to the Big Easy Driver example, I was also no longer able to turn the motor.
I would be very interested in assistance either fixing the motor or successfully integrating AccelStepper with the hardware.
Can you check the [Troubleshooting found in the comments of the Hookup Guide?
In particular the section:
Damaged Driver?
The development/breakout boards that are produced by SparkFun are usually tested on a pogobed tutorials/constant-innovation-in-quality-control and inspected by a technician for quality control before they are packaged and sent out. This reduces the chance that a bad board was sent out.
If you had a loose connection or a bad power supply and the stepper motor is not running (after checking the power supply, potentiometer, example code, and connections to your microcontroller), it’s possible that the driver was damaged. If you are able to move the stepper motor’s shaft and the board’s IC or GND plane gets extremely hot to the touch, the board might have been damaged. In extreme cases, the IC blows out from having a loose connection.
In one case, a driver was damaged. The stepper motor was not driving and the board would get hot to the touch. Checking the voltage regulator, there was a short caused by the fried A4988 driver IC. The board was able to function after removing and replacing the driver IC.