StepperBoard Products
Peter Norberg Consulting, Inc. manufactures and sells controllers for operating unipolar and bipolar stepper motors. These products incorporate easy wiring to the motors, and may be operated both by switch closures and through use of computer serial control (both USB and RS232). They all support microstepping of the motors, and some of the products can generate step requests at up to 62,500 microsteps/second (step rates are board model and firmware dependent).
Our stepper motor controllers are designed to be useful to researchers, experimenters and hobbyists, and are appropriate for industrial applications. They are excellent for control of anything from small linear actuator devices to medium-duty X-Y positioning tables. As-is, each can be directly used in small pan/tilt mechanisms. Using our products, only minimal external electronics are needed to operate any simple stepper-motor-driven device (such as implementing a computer-controlled security camera).
Please see our product summary page for more details on these and other products.
If you intend to order via the internet, we would suggest that you review our "Safe Internet Purchasing" page for some useful tips. The most important warning on that page is to never send your credit card information (i.e., card number) via email or any unencrypted connection.
Recent News and Announcements
On May 20, 2012 we updated the BC4E20NCRouter beta firmware to support reading of simple phase encoders.
On May 10, 2012 we updated the dsPicNCRouter2D and BC2D20NCRouter beta firmwares to support reading of simple phase encoders.
On March 18, 2012 we released the beta BC4E20NCRouter firmware for the BC4E20 series of products, as discussed here. This new firmware adds a much more powerful implementation of the NC style of control than was supported in our older product lines (and effectively matches the NC release done in January for the BS1010 and BC2D20 product lines).
On January 26, 2012 we released the beta dsPicNCRouter2D and BC2D20NCRouter firmwares for the BS1010 and BC2D20 series of products, as discussed here. These new firmwares add a much more powerful implementation of the NC style of control that was supported in our older product lines.
On August 8, 2011, we released firmware version 5.27 for our BS1010, BC2D20 and BC4E20 product lines. Thus update adds support for effectively unlimited ramp rates to the code, so that ramping of motor rates is limited only by the motor's capabilities. This update is available as part of the 'SetUpFirmwareUpdate.exe' application available from our downloads page.
On February 2, 2011 we released update 2.0.0.73 to our SimplexCNC application application.
On September 19, 2010 we released two products for full manufacturing.
Our BC2D20 series
is our upgrade to our BC2D15 product line, while our
BC4E20 is our upgrade for the BC4E15
series. They both increase the maximum current supported to 2
amps/winding, add extra I/O port control, analog input, flash memory
and other features to those systems.
On
December 16, 2009 we released our BS1010
product line. This board is the next generation of our
popular BS0710 product line, and
adds extra I/O ports, analog input, flash memory and other
features to that system.
WHQL Approved USB drivers are now available! On December 7, 2009, we released our WHQL approved version of the FTDI USB drivers for our boards. This release supports pre-installation of the drivers: you run the installer once, and from then on the operating system will automatically connect to our boards as needed.