how can I control 3 stepper motor in same time?

[c-m]

I want to control 3 stepper motor and 30 electro-valves.

I only had a few lessons on how to control one in C in college.

Now I need to do this in labview and using an board from NI

How can do the control of the three motors in same time?

What the best board to do this. Maybe the NI PCI 6034.

But I will need more than one?

[JB]

I recommand to use a NI-Motion board to control the motors and a digital output board to drive the valves. A PCI-7334, will allow you to control up to 4 steppers. Refine this search to select the most suited digital output board for your application.

[2photonGuy]

I use NI 7350. It has 8 axes to I can control 8 steppers at a time. But at the moment I am using just 5, 4 for linear and one for rotation.

Regards
Sneh@l

[JB]

There is no need to buy an expensive PCI-7358 stepper/servo controller if you only need to control 3 steppers !

[c-m]

In the first place I want to thanks the opinions
I need control 3 motors and 30 electro-valves.
I think the big problem will be to control the motors.
But,don’t know if will be better choose a separate NI board to  control the motor and another for the electro valves.

[JB]

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I think the big problem will be to control the motors.

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A motion controller will make this task really easy !

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But,don’t know if will be better choose a separate NI board to  control the motor and another for the electro valves.

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Yes, this is the way to go. See my first answer !

[Buechsenschuetz]

At least some of the NI motor controller boards have up to 32 digital lines which can be set to input or output. I did not write the software for our systems but we are using quite a few of the digital lines for our systems and have no problems reading the digital inputs or setting the digital outputs. Also, the digital outputs offer a high current sink capability and usually can be used to drive external drives without any interface circuits. The digital lines are available on a separate connector of the NI boards and there are also break-out boxes (with screw terminals) available. I do not see any serious problems to do your control tasks just with one NI motion controller board, as long as you do not have any special requirements (high sampling speed, high frequency pulse output etc) for the digital lines.

[JB]

Yes, you're right : the PCI-7334 has 32 DIOs. Extract from page 5-15 of the user manual :

The 32-bit digital I/O port is configured in hardware as four 8-bit digital I/O ports. The bits in a port are typically controlled and read with byte-wide bitmapped commands.
All digital I/O lines have programmable direction and polarity. Each output circuit can sink and source 24 mA.

The byte-wide bitmapped commands (MOMO --> must ON, must OFF) make the programming a little bit more complicated in comparison to a DAQmx DIO board.