03. Overall path to get my stepper motor under control

To get started, I purchased

• 1 Arduino Uno R3
• 1 Stepper Motor 42BYGH47401A: https://hackspark.fr/fr/step-motor-42bygh47-401a.html

A stepper motor is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a full rotation into a number of equal steps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_motor

To control my stepper motor from my Arduino card, I purchased

• 1 CNC shield for Arduino kit (GRBL compatible): https://hackspark.fr/fr/ramps-1-4-5x-stepper-motor-driver-mount-shield-for-arduino.html
• 1 motor driver DRV8825 with heat sink: https://hackspark.fr/fr/drv8825-stepper-motor-driver-with-heat-sink-widely-used-for-3d-printers-and-reprap.html

Grbl is a free, open source, high performance software for controlling the motion of machines that move, that make things, or that make things move, and will run on a straight Arduino. More here on GRBL: https://github.com/grbl/grbl/wiki

GRBL implements a so called G-Code: it's a language that allows to give orders to a CNC machine. Machine tools are usually monitored with 3 or 4 axes. In the case of my 2D plotter, the idea is to use the CNC shield for just 2 axes; optionally a third axis to move up and down the pen.

I had a Windows PC on which to install Arduino IDE: the latest version can be downloaded from http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software (v 1.6.4 in my case)

Hence the following path:

1. Getting my PC connected to Arduino
2. Compiling and sending GRBL on Arduino
3. Plugging Protoneer CNC shield and configuring DRV8825 driver
4. Plugging my stepper motor and testing it

Steps 1 thru 4 are covered in the next posts.

This video also gives a good idea of where we are heading to: