book review

How To Control Stepper Motors
by Michael Wright
self-published, 2016, 230 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

Don't look down your nose: beginners and hobbyists need to learn this stuff too. Michael Wright tells beginners how to identify a stepper motor, why you need an H-bridge, and how to control them using an Arduino and a TB6600 controller. There's some C code but the author neglects to mention that the student will need to use the Arduino IDE (which is free and runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX).

The book has quite a few technical errors, like claiming that PWM is an analog signal, and his formula on page 136 is nonsensical. Most of the stuff a real engineer would need isn't here, but engineers won't be reading this book. The audience is probably high school students who want to build a robot but find themselves baffled by a motor that has four or more wires coming out of it. This one will have them burning out motors, smoking circuit boards, and wrecking the house in no time. As Maxwell Smart would say, and . . . loving it.

jul 27 2022