Stern Spike Steppers

21 Apr 2019 - jab

With help of one of our users we added support for stepper in Stern Spike. It took a bit of trial and error but eventually we are proud to announce full stepper support for Stern Spike.

It seems like node board on Spike support up to four steppers. Steppers connect to light outputs on the board and a homing switch (which may be on another board). We guess that they are hardware-wise similar to the StepStick (but that does not matter if you are using an existing machine).

To configure a stepper in Spike you can use the following example:

   switches:
     s_stepper_home:
       number: 11-4

   steppers:
     stepper0:
       number: 10-0
       homing_mode: switch
       homing_switch: s_stepper_home
       platform_settings:
         speed: 20
         light_number: 10-10
       named_positions:
         100: test_1
         200: test_2
         500: test_3

This will configure Stepper 0 on node 10. You can choose a number from 0 to 3. Which ones does not matter but you can only use every number once.

Then you need to look up the motor reference number in your manual. This is an example from Game of Thrones LE:

We are interested in 10-LP-10. This is used as light_number above. 10-LP-11 is not used and we guess that Spike automatically uses the next output as well.

The home switch is called Dragon Home in GoT and has the number 11-SW-4 according to the manual. We configure is as s_stepper_home in this example.

You can change speed and homing_speed to configure how fast the stepper will move. See Stepper Motors for more details about steppers.

Steppers in Spike are now available in MPF dev and will land in 0.53 soon. Did we forget anything? Please let us know! Discussions in MPF-Users.