As I said previously, I have been slowly developing my second CNC Machine, TheMaker2. To control the new CNC machine I developed a new board based on a PIC16LF877A since the L297's that I used on the first CNC controller board that I designed can be quite expensive here in Portugal and I had some PIC16LF877A samples lying around that with a few programming lines could do the same or even more than three L297 stepper motor controllers.
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Once again, the board design can be split in three parts:
- Isolation - it has Vishay's CNY17-2 optocouplers to isolate the parallel port from the rest of the circuit;
- Driver - a Microchips' PIC16LF877A drives three stepper motors in unipolar mode (if you prefer bipolar you can change the schematics and boards at your will);
- Power Interface - a bunch of Vishay's SUP85N03 N channel FETs working as switches controlled by the PIC16LF877A.