Working on a project that wants to use a stepper motor to provide motion, and Lumini LED arrays for excitement (I hope). Driving the project with an ESP32 Thing Plus; driving the stepper with an AdaFruit featherwing motor driver (hey Sparkfun revised the Thing to make it compatible with the featherwing form factor, so why not?) Why not is that the motor driver executes a single command and then stops, waiting for new instructions. At that point the Lumini “excitement” becomes quite boring. Digging down in the driver board guide, it warns that this happens. What I want is a board that will take a command like “step this size at this rate in this direction until I tell you otherwise” presumably via an interrupt. Then the Thing Plus can run the LEDs like it does without the motor. Is this possible? Which of the several Sparkfun driver boards would do this?
Unfortunately we don’t have a single board that would do what you’re looking for but by combining a microcontroller like a Pro Mini and a stepper motor driver together you could accomplish your goal.
The idea is that the Pro Mini would execute a program that keeps sending data out to the stepper driver while listening to your ESP for new instructions. You’re sort of offloading all the overhead of driving the motor onto a separate controller so that your ESP is free to drive LEDs. It’s possible you might be able to code your ESP to do both functions but depending on how busy the ESP gets running animations on your LEDs, it might slow down the motor.
This is a little advanced, but the ESP32 has 2 cores and you could use both to run separate operations. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_D_Qu0cgu8. That being said, that topic is most likely beyond the scope of our tech support team, so you’d have to work it out on your own.