A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier – Black Edition

The Pololu Black Edition A4988 stepper motor driver carrier is a higher-performance drop-in replacement for the original A4988 stepper motor driver carrier. It features a four-layer PCB for better thermal performance, allowing the A4988 microstepping bipolar stepper motor driver to deliver approximately 20% more current than our two-layer (green) version.

Like the original carrier, the Black Edition offers adjustable current limiting, over-current and over-temperature protection, and five different microstep resolutions. It operates from 8 V to 35 V and can deliver up to 2 A per coil with sufficient additional cooling.

This product is a carrier board or breakout board for Allegro’s A4988 DMOS Microstepping Driver with Translator and Overcurrent Protection; we therefore recommend careful reading of the A4988 datasheet before using this product. This stepper motor driver lets you control one bipolar stepper motor at up to 2 A output current per coil (see the Power Dissipation Considerations section below for more information).

Some unipolar stepper motors (e.g. those with six or eight leads) can be controlled by this driver as bipolar stepper motors. For more information, please see the frequently asked questions. Unipolar motors with five leads cannot be used with this driver.

This product can get hot enough to burn you long before the chip overheats. Take care when handling this product and other components connected to it.

Features

• Simple step and direction control interface
• Five different step resolutions: full-step, half-step, quarter-step, eighth-step, and sixteenth-step
• Adjustable current control lets you set the maximum current output with a potentiometer, which lets you use voltages above your stepper motor’s rated voltage to achieve higher step rates
• Intelligent chopping control that automatically selects the correct current decay mode (fast decay or slow decay)
• Over-temperature thermal shutdown, under-voltage lockout, and crossover-current protection
• Short-to-ground and shorted-load protection
• 4-layer, 2 oz copper PCB for improved heat dissipation
• Exposed solderable ground pad below the driver IC on the bottom of the PCB

Specifications

Minimum operating voltage:	8 V
Maximum operating voltage:	35 V
Continuous current per phase:	1.2 A2
Maximum current per phase:	2 A3
Minimum logic voltage:	3 V
Maximum logic voltage:	5.5 V
Microstep resolutions:	full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16
Reverse voltage protection?:	N
Bulk packaged?:	N
Header pins soldered?:	N4

Included hardware

This product ships with all surface-mount components—including the A4988 driver IC—installed as shown in the product picture. The A4988 stepper motor driver carrier comes with one 1×16-pin breakaway 0.1′ male header. The headers can be soldered in for use with solderless breadboards or 0.1′ female connectors. You can also solder your motor leads and other connections directly to the board.

Using the driver

Power connections

The driver requires a logic supply voltage (3 – 5.5 V) to be connected across the VDD and GND pins and a motor supply voltage (8 – 35 V) to be connected across VMOT and GND. These supplies should have appropriate decoupling capacitors close to the board, and they should be capable of delivering the expected currents (peaks up to 4 A for the motor supply).

Warning: This carrier board uses low-ESR ceramic capacitors, which makes it susceptible to destructive LC voltage spikes, especially when using power leads longer than a few inches. Under the right conditions, these spikes can exceed the 35 V maximum voltage rating for the A4988 and permanently damage the board, even when the motor supply voltage is as low as 12 V. One way to protect the driver from such spikes is to put a large (at least 47 µF) electrolytic capacitor across motor power (VMOT) and ground somewhere close to the board.

Motor connections

Four, six, and eight-wire stepper motors can be driven by the A4988 if they are properly connected; an FAQ answer explains the proper wirings in detail.

Warning: Connecting or disconnecting a stepper motor while the driver is powered can destroy the driver. (More generally, rewiring anything while it is powered is asking for trouble.)

Step (and microstep) size

Stepper motors typically have a step size specification (e.g. 1.8° or 200 steps per revolution), which applies to full steps. A microstepping driver such as the A4988 allows higher resolutions by allowing intermediate step locations, which are achieved by energizing the coils with intermediate current levels. For instance, driving a motor in quarter-step mode will give the 200-step-per-revolution motor 800 microsteps per revolution by using four different current levels.

The resolution (step size) selector inputs (MS1, MS2, and MS3) enable selection from the five step resolutions according to the table below. MS1 and MS3 have internal 100kΩ pull-down resistors and MS2 has an internal 50kΩ pull-down resistor, so leaving these three microstep selection pins disconnected results in full-step mode. For the microstep modes to function correctly, the current limit must be set low enough (see below) so that current limiting gets engaged. Otherwise, the intermediate current levels will not be correctly maintained, and the motor will skip microsteps.

MS1	MS2	MS3	Microstep Resolution
Low	Low	Low	Full step
High	Low	Low	Half step
Low	High	Low	Quarter step
High	High	Low	Eighth step
High	High	High	Sixteenth step

Control inputs

Each pulse to the STEP input corresponds to one microstep of the stepper motor in the direction selected by the DIR pin. Note that the STEP and DIR pins are not pulled to any particular voltage internally, so you should not leave either of these pins floating in your application.

If you just want rotation in a single direction, you can tie DIR directly to VCC or GND. The chip has three different inputs for controlling its many power states: RST, SLP, and EN. For details about these power states, see the datasheet. Please note that the RST pin is floating; if you are not using the pin, you can connect it to the adjacent SLP pin on the PCB to bring it high and enable the board.

Current limiting

Power dissipation considerations

The A4988 driver IC has a maximum current rating of 2 A per coil, but the actual current you can deliver depends on how well you can keep the IC cool. The carrier’s printed circuit board is designed to draw heat out of the IC, but to supply more than approximately 1.2 A per coil, a heat sink or other cooling method is required (in our tests, we were able to deliver approximately 1.4 A per coil with air flow from a PC fan and no heat sink).

This product can get hot enough to burn you long before the chip overheats. Take care when handling this product and other components connected to it.

Please note that measuring the current draw at the power supply will generally not provide an accurate measure of the coil current. Since the input voltage to the driver can be significantly higher than the coil voltage, the measured current on the power supply can be quite a bit lower than the coil current (the driver and coil basically act like a switching step-down power supply).

Also, if the supply voltage is very high compared to what the motor needs to achieve the set current, the duty cycle will be very low, which also leads to significant differences between average and RMS currents.

Package Contents

• 1x A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier
• 1x Male header strip

Resources

• All Resources
  • Arduino Library
  • Allegro A4988 Driver datasheet
  • Dimension Diagram
  • 3D Model
  • Schematic