A stepper motor and serial communication interface daughter board for educational use

This paper presents the design and development of a daughter board consisting of stepper motor drivers and serial interfaces. The purpose of this board is to provide embedded systems students with a tool to design and develop automation applications using stepper motors and simple RS-232C serial communications. The stepper motors used is a bipolar six-wire configuration motor. Software drivers for serial communication and the stepper motors are written in the 'C' language using the High-performance Embedded Workshop (HEW) Integrated Development Environment provided with the Renesas Embedded Evaluation Board. The stepper motors are programmed to drive in full step, half step, and micro step mode. The circuit functionality was tested on a breadboard, and on compliance with the performance, a PCB was manufactured.