Building a Sangaboard-compatible motor controller

The official project uses the Sangaboard motor controller, but this is currently difficult to get hold of. This guide tells you how to create your own motor controller that is compatible with the Sangaboard firmware. This will allow you to drive the 28BYJ-48 stepper motors used for the microscope.

For this section you will need:

Tools

Consumables

Electronic Components

Step 1: Wire up the boards

Each of your motors should have come with a driver board. You should wire these up to and Arduino Nano using jumper cables as shown in the diagram below:

Simple motor controller with Arduino

The motor order is x-motor, y-motor, z-motor from top to bottom of this diagram.

Step 2: Wire up the power

We use a soldering iron to create the power cables.

To power the boards you need a 5V voltage source. We create this from a USB power supply.

Step 3: Load the firmware

Using the Arduno IDE load the Sangaboard arduino sketch onto the Arduino nano


Troubleshooting