Welcome to Oriental Motor's "Engineering Notes" Blog:

A driver is a must-have for any stepper motor.  In a stepper motor system, a driver controls how the motor operates based on signals received from the controller.  It is responsible for sending current through various phases in a stepper motor and also regulates the motor current (torque) and step resolution.  With recent trends of minimizing machine footprint, finding space to install drivers could be challenging.

Standard Stepper Motor System Configuration

With recent trends focusing on improving engineering efficiency, many products have been developed to specifically help shorten design cycles for machine automation.  Part of improving efficiency is making products easier to use, so additional time and resources can be spent elsewhere.  This post describes a product feature that can make index table applications less complex to manage.

There are many stepper motor manufacturers in the market place, but there are even more stepper motor driver manufacturers.  The crowded market place provides many standard product options for customers to build their motion control system just the way they like it. 

However, if the best possible performance is desired, it would be difficult to beat a tested combination of a specific motor and driver from the same manufacturer.  By combining R&D knowledge from both motors and drivers, unique product features can be developed to improve performance further.  

Stepper motors are popular for their ability to stop accurately as well as their ease of use.  Both the amount of rotation and the speed are controlled easily with the same digital square wave pulse signal.  Unlike servo motors, stepper motors do not need an encoder to operate.  Example applications of stepper motors are CNC machines, index tables, robotics, scanners, and more recently, 3D printers.