Intro
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G'day from Downunder

I'm Terry the Technician and welcome to my Embedded Forth Stepper Motor Demo

This demo shows how a stepper motor may be controlled in real time from a serial terminal by entering the desired number of steps, positive for forward, and negative for reverse. The absolute number of steps are shown after each movement is completed.

The terminal could be a Android tablet connected via WiFI, the application could be a robotic arm, a coil winding machine ... anything that needs a standalone, real time stepper motor controller.

Parts used are a STM32F0 Discovery and a cheap Chinese geared stepper motor with driver board. Both are powered from a typical USB wall wart. The Forth is Mecrisp-Stellaris and the MCU is a ARM based 32 bit STM32F051 with 64KB of Flash and 8 KB of RAM.

Naturally by changing the PSU, motor and driver, any stepper could be used, and the MCU can run standalone with only a USB/3.3 volt serial dongle. The Discovery Board isn't required and only used for this demo. Any board with a STM32F0 variant could be used.

This project is detailed on my Forth Documentation site including code, notes, schematic etc and the URL is listed below the video.

Demo
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I've entered 1000 followed by the command "s", for STEPS

Now entered NEGATIVE -500 steps

Maths can be entered directly in RPM, 20 times 18 commands the stepper to move forward by 360 steps

Let's move back to the origin which is 860 steps behind us.

Finally, this motor is geared and required 2048 steps per revolution. A "r" word , short for REVOLUTION  when entered will perform the required number of revolutions.