Powerful stepper motor board for the Raspberry Pi

The guys at Canadian company Roboteurs are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new stepper motor driver board – the SlushEngine. It looks like a stunning piece of kit and has the following features:

  • Controls up to 4 bi-polar stepper motors
  • Max 7A / motor
  • 9-35 V DC operating range
  • 1-128 microstepping capabilities
  • Integrated motion engine in stepper driver
  • 4 limit switch inputs
  • 4 general purpose industrial inputs
  • 4 general purpose industrial outputs (3A / 24V)
  • 8 additional logic level I/O
  • Thermistor temperature sensing
  • UEXT expansion connector
  • Raspberry Pi fused power source

It’s compatible with the B+, Pi 2 and A+ and looks like it could be a lot of fun to use, especially for projects where you absolutely, positively have to use powerful stepper motors – 7A per motor will certainly go a long way! The board comes with a simple-to-use Python library which lets you start up a motor with just three lines of Python. It’s great to see a company get the software right in addition to the hardware. It will also be completely open source, which is good to see.

The board is currently available to Earlybirds at $190 (Canadian Dollars) plus delivery, which works out at approximately £125 delivered. It’s quite expensive, but for those of you who have a specific application it could well be the board you’ve been looking for. Large power-hungry projects will certainly benefit from the engineering on display here. There’s also an $80 (£67-ish delivered) version to drive one stepper motor.

Take a look at the Kickstarter here if you’d like to find out more.

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