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.
Recent News and Announcements
On January 11, 2010 we released an update to version 2.0.0.28 of our SimplexCNC application. The application now supports all of the boards from both our SD4D and SD4DP series of products, as well as operation on many netbook computers.
On
December 16, 2009 we released our new 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.
On July 6, 2009 we released our updated BC4E15 product line. The new board now has ESD protection, as well as optional support of being partially powered from the USB connection (please note that stepper motors cannot be powered from USB, due to current limitations).
On June 20, 2009 we released our updated USBToTTL converter boards. Both now have ESD protection, while one (the USBToTTLEU) now supports providing a 5 volt tap from the USB bus (which automatically shuts off if the computer goes to sleep).
We also released our updated UCC30xx series of current regulated dual axis unipolar controller boards. The new versions are USB based, have ESD protection, and support optional powering of the logic portion of the board (NOT the motors!) off of the USB system.
On June 5, 2009 we released our new SD4DGenIO firmware, which supports generic TTL I/O, encoder operation, and pulse generation using the SD4D series of boards.
On May 29, 2009 we released our two upgrades to the SD4D series of step-and-direction controller boards. The SD4DEI adds ESD protection and digital isolation, while the SD4DEU adds ESD protection and optional powering via the USB system.
On March 10, 2009 we updated our StepperBoard class libraries (both the Active-X and the .Net versions) to automatically keep the computer from entering sleep as long as I/O is active to any of our stepper controller products.
On February 20, 2009 we released our SimplexCNC application from beta testing. It is now considered to be a fully released and supported product offering. SimplexCNC allows operation of small routers using a specialized firmware installed on our SD4DP four-motor step-