What types of stepper motor should I use?

[williamhk]

HI,
I'm trying to build a system using a stepper motor to turn the knob of a delay line.
For that, I need the stepper motor to (1) turn at a high resolution (perhaps 1 deg per step) (2) be consistent in each turning step (3) be easily programmable.
Can anyone tell me which types of stepper motor to get? Is a 2-phase stepper motor a good candidate?
Thanks!
william

[Amaury]

Hi William,

You may want to look at some of our Motion Advisors.
1. It is very typical to get steppers with 200 Steps/Rev which is less than 1deg, it should not be hard to find one with more probably 500 Steps/Rev should do the trick.

2. A good stepper motor should have it's stepps evenly and consitantly spaced. Note, you can multiply your effective number of steps with a microstepping drive. However, you can not count on the microstepping steps to be at regular or linear intervals. Microstepping does however keep the motor moving more smoothly between whole steps, therefore it is advantageous to have a microstepping drive, but make sure to allways stop on a whole step to keep this consistancy.

3. The prog
raming is all done on the motion controller (IE PCI7344) and all done in LabVIEW. There is a good API and examples for almost anything you want to do.
You can find out more about the Motion control products in the Motion Product page.

Hope this helps!
Regards,
Amaury Rolin
NI Application Engineer