VB & The Stepper Motor Driver BV4113
Resources VC Code IASI-BV4113-Source.zip
The BV4113 is an ASI serial stepper motor driver that has digital i/o and also analogue input. It can also drive DC motors and includes pulse width modulation. This short article assumes that a connection has been made to the BV4114 via a BV101-4 USB to Serial convertor as shown. The source code for this is in the above link, although the BV4113 is capable of much more this article only deals with the stepper side of the device. The code does however contain functions for the digital i/o, ADC and pulse width modulation.
The above shows the connection by a short length of wire but the BV4113 will in fact directly plug into the BV101-4 if required. The BV101 will provide power to the circuitry but will not supply the motor power, this must be done separately the though the pins marked power.
This is the test arrangement, the power is supplied by a BV1102 that will regulate the output of any AC/DC adaptor to 12V which is just right for this particular stepper. The motor is unusual in itself as it has a built in gearbox and takes 2000 steps per revolution.
Tips For Connecting Steppers
I have found that EVERY stepper motor that I have taken out of an old printer or other device works eventually and the quickest way is to find out the common wire and then simply switch the other wires around until the motor works smoothly. I have only ever come across 4,5 and 6 wire motors:
Four wire motor do not have a common connection and so just connect Y1-Y4, crossing over the wires works for most motors but not all:
If there are more than 4 wires then one (or 2 in a 6 wire motor) is common to the other windings. The only way to discover which it is, is to find the lowest resistance to the other wires:
| Resistance | W1 | W2 | W3 | W4 | W5 |
| 300 | X | X | |||
| 600 | X | X | |||
| 600 | X | X | |||
| 600 | X | X |
Given the above set of results it is fairly obvious that W1 is the common wire. Further measurements can be made form W1-W3, W1-W4 etc. to verify this.
The binary "BV4113.exe" can be found in the IASI-BV4113-Source\IASI-BV4113\bin\Release directory when the code file has been unzipped into a suitable directory, running it should produce something like the above. Open the com port and connect with "Connect-Non-inv". The blue section is for experimenting with the stepper.