Sunday's WOSAG Zoom

Another excellent Zoom Meeting this afternoon run by the West of Scotland Area Group. Over forty people joined the meeting.

Davy Dick first showed us a commercially available multi function stepper motor driver module. Operating between 5 and 12 Volts it works on both four and five wire motors.

Four different operating modes are available selected by jumper. There are two push button switches on the board that have different effects depending on the selected mode. These switches could be removed and replaced by external ones.

In addition a 4pin header allows further connection to switches or sensors. The large pot controls the speed of the motor and the smaller one, the length of travel when that mode has been selected.

This is a good board for simple end to end travel ( shuttles) and costs less than £5 on eBay (other suppliers are available).

Davy demonstrated it working driving a NEMA-17 motor with lead-screw and limit switches and then with the much cheaper 28BYJ type.

The flexibility of being able to handle 4 and 5 wire types, makes it really useful for testing motors from salvaged equipment (DVD players, Floppy disk drives etc)

The next part of the meeting covered the software used for laying out a circuit on stripboard.

There are free softwares available like VeeCad and Fritzing which will do the job although they are not as intuitive or flexible as the one used by Davy to create the layouts for his Pocket Money projects.

Costing 48.64 Euros as a download, LochMaster version 4 can also be downloaded as a free trial version for a 30 day evaluation period.

As Davy demonstrated, this is a very powerful piece of software allowing component rotation, track splitting and copy and paste of components or groups of components.

Perhaps the most useful feature is the connection test allowing you to check for continuity and conflicts,

If you only design circuits infrequently, I would try the other free offerings first.

If you are serious about designing or modifying or extending available circuits, try the free version of LochMaster and decide if you think it's worth it.

Andy R

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