Stepper motors with the Firefly shield

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Comment by manny ferro on April 2, 2015 at 4:35pm

Andy,

Thank you very much i will try what you have instructed me .

Much appreciated

Manny

Comment by Andy Payne on April 2, 2015 at 10:46am

Also, if you're using the Firefly Prototyping Shield, you'll need to modify the Quad Stepper Firmata to work with the correct pin numbers.  The shield uses Pin 10 for controlling the direction and Pin 12 for the number of steps.  So, you need to edit the Quad Stepper Firmata for Motor A (for example).  On line 29, you need to change the line to: #define DIR_PIN_A 10 and then change line 30 to: #define STEP_PIN_A 12.  Then, upload this to your board and then go through your Grasshopper process.  Note, the Firefly shield only uses one easy stepper driver... so you'll only be able to control a single stepper.  In the example outlined above, we modified it so it works with Motor A (or Motor 1).  So, in your Grasshopper example the only one you will be able to control is the M1 input. 

Comment by Andy Payne on April 2, 2015 at 10:41am

A couple of things I notice that seem strange in your image.  First, it seems odd that you're COM port is showing Port 1.  Usually it starts at 3 and increments with each new board attached to your computer... so 1 seems strange.  Also, the serial port is closed, so you wont be able to control your steppers until you open the port.  Lastly, the Stepper Motor component also has to have the Start toggle set to true before actually sending values to the board.  Hopefully that helps.