MakerBot Industries

This new board has been in development by the RRRF for quite a while as we’ve been trying to get it just right. The v2.3 design has homed in on the excellent A3982 stepper motor driver chip from Allegro. This chip is cheap, reliable, and excellent. This new board actually drops the price of EACH stepper driver by about $10 and makes it easier to build. Its surface mount, but using the hot-plate soldering method, you get a much nicer board and I’ve actually found it to be much easier than soldering up a million through hole components.

This board has the same pinouts as the previous Stepper Motor Driver v1.2 board, so will be a very simple upgrade if you’re so inclined. The pinouts for the stepper connector, opto endstops, IDC connector, and power connector are all the same. Yay for standard interfaces!

Thanks to Lou Amadio, and the RepRap team for help in refining this board.

Anyway, you can get kits and pcbs from MakerBot Industries. We’ll have fully assembled boards in a few months as well if you’re too stubborn to learn SMD soldering and DIY.

Oh, and if the new hotness of the board isn’t enough, check out this video of the new stepper tester code I wrote to go along with it. Tell me that doesn’t make you smile and I’ll frost you a cupcake.

Test Pattern 8 from MakerBot Industries on Vimeo.