Programmable Ministep Drive

A cylindrical permanent magnet inside the four-phase permanent magnet (PM) stepping motor is employed as the rotor. The stator has four teeth around, which its coils are wound. The mode of excitation can be classified into 3 modes: single-phase excitation, two-phase excitation and ministep excitation. The ministep drive is a method to subdivide one step into several small steps by means of electronics. The paper presents the programmable ministep technique drive. This technique decodes the results obtained from the counter to locate the data in Read Only Memory (ROM). The Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) is transformed to binary file and saved to the ROM. The experiment is performed with the four-phase PM stepping motor and drives from a two-phase programmable sinusoidal ministep signal, instead of square wave. The results show that the performances of the proposed programmable ministep technique drive have high efficiency, smooth step motion, and high speed response. Moreover, the resolution of sinusoidal ministep signal can be controlled by the input frequency (f command).