Independent control of up to Sixteen Stepper Motors  through  One serial port (RS-232C) of any computer or RS-232 link. With four on-board drivers, the ST400NT will work with practically any stepper motor up to two amps and 45 volts at a step rate of between 16 and 8,500 steps per second.

The ST400 Series can operate in full step mode, both monophasic and biphasic, and half step mode. The boards also support acceleration and deceleration capabilities. Inputs for abort, home,and limit give the user the freedom for sensing motor home, limiting excursion and aborting the motion with an emergency switch.

Incremental encoder inputs are available for each axis for closed loop control applications allowing position feedback A stall detection feature controls the positioning error and stops the motor if the valid position change is not received from the encoder.

The ST400NT board also provides control of the winding current on each motor. The operating current can be set at any value between .1 and 2 Amps under software control trough a DAC (8 bits). This allows the user to keep both power consumption and heat generation to a minimum, while the motors are idle, by reducing the winding current.

Smooth motion and higher torque is achievable at high speeds thanks to the velocity profiling mode, which allows the creation of custom speed profiles using the internal FIFO ( 128 bytes) on the RMV856 stepper motor controller.

Data Acquisition Capabilities

Not only does a single ST400 Board provide sequential or simultaneous control for up to four stepper motors, but also offers data acquisition and control capabilities. Standard on each ST400 Board are 11 analog channels with 10 or 12 bit analog to digital conversion, and 26 TTL compatible digital I/O lines. This greatly extends the functionality of the product, enabling the movement of the stepper motors to be interfaced to analog or digital inputs or digital outputs.

Application Development

Development of applications for this product is greatly facilitated by a comprehensive, 32 bit Dynamic Link Library (DLL) which provides easy access to all of the ST400 board’s many functions. This DLL which allows easy interfacing to Windows based programming languages, employs easy to remember commands such as ‘MotorGoToAbsolutePosition’, ‘MotorPause’, MotorTrigger’ and ‘MotorStop’. Custom applications can be quickly developed and tested using these simple yet powerful functions. The creation of custom applications is made even simpler by a number of software examples provided for a number of popular high level programming languages

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