LIFA with L6470 stepper drive

[mudithadias]

Hi,

I'm trying to control a stepper motor with a sparkfun L6470 stepper drive and using LIFA. I tried using the example given in labview but the motor does not run. when I run the program from the front panel, the RX and TX LEDs on the arduino uno board light up. On the front panel the LED for 'steps remaining' light up and turns off when the time needed for the total number of steps is completed. But no pulse on the motor   I followed the highlight execution on the block diagram and it automatically runs in the 'timeout' event not in the 'ok button' event. (I don't know what that means..just saying incase it's helpful).

I"m new to labVIEW and arduino and would really really appreciate if someone could help me figure out what's wrong. Thanks in advance !!

(The wire connections I have b/w the arduino and L6470 are as follows: D10-CSN, D11-SDI, D12-SDO, D13-CK, D6-STBY, D4-BSYN, GND-GND)

[Nathan_B.]

The stepper functions that come with LIFA will not work with that breakout board.  That breakout board works using SPI communication to operate it.  See the datasheet for the device for more information.

[mudithadias]

Hi Nathan,

Do you mean LIFA won't support the breakout board or if the example given is not written for the breakout board? There are some SPI bus specific functions in the functions palette in labVIEW under Arduino...any idea if those can be used to create a VI to control the stepper using the L6470 and Arduino? Please help!

Thank you so much.

MudithaDias

[Nathan_B.]

The stepper functions that come with LIFA will not work with that breakout board.  You have to use the existing SPI LIFA VIs to send commands to that breakout board.

[mudithadias]

Oh okay thanks. Do you know of any tutorials or examples that might help me with that.

Thank you

[Nathan_B.]

I generally first look for Arduino-based implementations to see a practical use example of things that I do not already know how to do.  Then, you can essentially port the text based code to LabVIEW with the LIFA SPI VIs.  This is what I would recommend here.

In fact, the example that you base your LabVIEW code on doesn't need to be specifically for Arduino, any working example will be sufficient (along with testing).

[mudithadias]

okay thank you Nathan. I'll try that out!