SLOA312 December   2021 DRV8412 , DRV8424 , DRV8426 , DRV8428 , DRV8434 , DRV8436 , DRV8803 , DRV8804 , DRV8805 , DRV8806 , DRV8844 , DRV8847 , DRV8932 , DRV8935 , DRV8955

PRODUCTION DATA  

  1.   Trademarks
  2. 1Introduction
  3. 2Principle of Operation
    1. 2.1 Unipolar Stepper Motors
    2. 2.2 Bipolar Stepper Motors
  4. 3How to Drive Unipolar Stepper Motors with DRV8xxx Drivers
    1. 3.1 Driving Unipolar Motor with Four-channel Low-side Driver
    2. 3.2 Driving a Unipolar Motor with a Bipolar Driver
    3. 3.3 Driving Unipolar Motor with Four-channel Half-Bridge Driver
      1. 3.3.1 Driving in Full-step Mode
        1. 3.3.1.1 Full-step Mode with One Phase ON
        2. 3.3.1.2 Two Phases ON
      2. 3.3.2 Driving in Half-step Mode
      3. 3.3.3 Example Pseudocode
        1. 3.3.3.1 Code for Full-step with One Phase ON
        2. 3.3.3.2 Code for Full-step with Two Phase ON
        3. 3.3.3.3 Code for Half-step
  5. 4References

1 Introduction

Stepper motors come in many different varieties, but there are two main winding configurations for permanent magnet and hybrid stepper motors: unipolar and bipolar. Bipolar motors are currently more widely used, and some legacy systems are slowly phasing out unipolar stepper motors in favor of bipolar steppers. Nevertheless, unipolar stepper motors are still used in several applications such as textile machines, printers, Pachinko, and slot machines.

The DRV8xxx stepper drivers from Texas Instruments are primarily meant to drive bipolar stepper motors. But some of them can drive unipolar stepper motors as well. The following sections describe how various DRV8xxx drivers can be adapted to drive unipolar stepper motors.