Stepper motor control - missing MG17Motor ActiveX object

Hello,
I am trying to contrl Thorlabs TDC 001 using LabView 9 SP1. Whe I follow the tutorial to create an ActiveX control(http://www.thorlabs.com/images/TabImages/GuideToLabVIEWandAPT.pdf), I can't find the MG17Motor option even though I have installed Thorlabs APT.
Does aanyone kknow how to solve this?
Cheers!

Hello,
I used attached Labview code to manage stepper motor control (TDC001 Thorlabs) to translate a sample in my setup, but since some time I obtain an error constantly (attached log). This translation system still works properly with thorlabs software, it also worked with this code, therefore I am really confused why such an error occurs. I just got started with Labview and programme wasn't created by me, so maybe someone explain what is wrong.
Thank you in advance, Vasili

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Position drift during the stepper motor controlled back and forth motion

Hi everyone there,
I get a headache position drift problem during the stepper motor controlled back and forth motion. I have been wroking on the problem for the last two weeks, and still can not figure it out. So I write down here my problem in hope of getting some clues from those have some experiences in stepper motor motion control.
My goal is to use a stepper motor to drive a beam flage fixed onto the shaft to go back and forth for a certain angle, and this back and forth motion needs to be stable and reproducible within hours. With the SMD1 stepper motor driver, I only need to send in a pulse train to control the number of steps(the pulse frequency defines the stepping rate), and another pulse to controle the direction (i.e., cw or ccw). To do this, in LabView, I used the counter of the DAQ board to produce a finite pulse train to step the motor, and used one digital line to produce a pulse to switch the direction every 500ms, the timing is contolled by the software.(I used the oscilloscope to monitor these two pulses, the pulse train produced by the counter looks very stable, and delay between the pulse edges of the direction pulse and the pulse train is also very stable within 500ms. There seems no software timing problems at such a long delay.) And this labview controlled motor appears to work perfectly as I required, the motor steps a defined number of steps at one direction, and then steps back at the origin position. But after running for a few minutes, the back position shifts gradually(I can not observe a obvious shift at the first few minutes) with repect to the origin position(the position I start running). I looked it up at the manual and also the website, I got a clue that this might because the motor steps at the resonace frequency of the motor and hence misses or takes extral steps sometimes. So I changed the steping rate from 1Hz to 1000Hz to see if the shift disappears or gets smaller at certain frequency range, but the shift always exists.
I did observe the shift got smaller within the same running time when change the step model from full step (1.8degree/step)to half and quarter step model. According to this, the motor did miss steps (or pulses) during running, the quarter step model has smaller shift due to the smaller steps. But I also noticed that the motor always shift at one direction, no matter I started with clockwise or counter-clockwise, this seems really strange to me. Because the motor should shift at each direction with the same probability if we assume the motor missis steps randomly.
There is something must be wrong, either the labveiw program or the motor, but I don't even know a clue of this weird shift problem. And because of this, I haven't made any progress in my lab for the last three weeks. So any suggestions could be very helpful for solving this headache and will be really appreciated.
Thanks a million in advance and Merry Christmas!
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Hey, Brian Beal,
Thanks for your quick response. "accel" and "decel" mean acceleration and deceleration, am I understanding right?
If yes, then I don't have these in my LabView program, I just generate one TTL pulse train and one TTL pulse with LabView and send them into the SMD1 stepper motor driver.
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Yesterday, I confirmed that if the motor steer always at one direction either CW or CCW, then the stepping were very stable, no missing or extra steps happen for hours.
And I also observed that the motor took one extra step from time to time when the direction changes. And this only happens when the direction switch from CW to CCW. (bizarre!)
I guess this indicates that some pulse noise happens when the motor switch the direction too often. But I just don't have any clue for irregular extra steps.

I need an example vi about stepper motor control

Hi.
My system is consist of pc-tio-10 controller, SLOSYN SS2000D6 driver, NEMA 17 stepper motor,and labview5.1.
I'm trying to give a pulse to the motor, take a pulse from the motor and control the nmotor. But I don't know what to do. So I want to see the example vi.
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Here is an older example from LV 3.X, but the concept is still valid.
Attachments:
STEPPER.TXT ‏2 KB
STEPPER.LLB ‏197 KB

Best way to make this stepper motor control system

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Solved!
Go to Solution.

Nick,
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Stepper motor and loacell PID control - waveform motion.

Hi,
Hardware : cRio9073, C series module 9403 for stepper motor control and 9215 for load cell data acquisition.
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Attachments:
PIDControl.vi ‏23 KB
BIOGROWTH.lvproj ‏46 KB

Hi Lawrence,
Here is an example PID VI.
Regards
Rico P
Attachments:
General PID Simulator.vi ‏22 KB

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So basically my goal here is to use LabView to control the direction and the steps of the stepper motor.
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Attachments:
4LeadBipolarSteppingDriver-linengineering--4218m-54p-04.pdf ‏652 KB
DriverR701.pdf ‏379 KB

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Using Software Timed Digital IO to control a stepper motor with DAQmx:
http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-6385
Stepper motor control via Parallel port:
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/3611
High Performance Stepper/Servo control:
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/10026
Stepper Motor Theory of Operation:
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/ph/p/id/248
Stepper motor Drives:
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/3308
Adam
Academic Product Manager
National Intruments

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>
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I have a top-level VI (version 7 in WindowsXP) that contains an ActiveX control. This ActiveX object further calls several DLL’s, one of which controls the serial port. SubVIs in the top-level VI call this ActiveX object via Invoke Node and Property Node. Everything works in the LabVIEW development environment. The ActiveX object is registered using the “regsvr32” command and is made with Visual C++.
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I'm not exactly sure what is going wrong, but I have some information that might help. As has been mentioned in some of the referenced posts, Windows has completely different ways of finding DLLs depending on the technology being used.
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ACTION ITEM
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Stepper motor vi

Hi,
I am relatively new to the labview codes for stepper motor control.
Let me start by writing what I am trying to achieve. I am trying to control a valve with a stepper motor. I have a bipolar stepper motor from Oriental motor co. mounted on the valve. I dont have the driver/ controller for the motor. I am thinking of buying a third party low cost controller that will drive the motor and use the labview to talk to the controller.
I am using labview 6.0 and I guess but I am not sure if one can write a simple stepper vi. that will allow one to get around. I already have 6024E data aquisition card running on the computer.
Can anyone suggest how should I go with in achieving this?
Thanks
SAL

Hi Sal -
Most motion applications involve a controller, a drive, and a
motor. The controller runs a deterministic feedback-control loop
and sends updated commands to the drive. A separate drive unit is
necessary because the PCI/PXI bus is incapable of sourcing the current
required by the motor. The drive also takes commands from the
controller to handle error situations and shut down the motor
appropriately.
NI offers a line of motion controllers (PCI/PXI-733x, 734x. 7350) and
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systems. The controllers have a driver call NI-Motion and an
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inputs and algorithms, you can use the NI SoftMotion module. This
module allows you to create a custom controller from your LabVIEW
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NI motion controllers and drives can be found here: NI Motion Hardware
The SoftMotion module is described here: NI SoftMotion Development Module
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How to eliminate the noise from the stepper motor

I’m using stepper motors to move a traverse on which a hot-wire anemometer probe is mounted. When the stepper motors are turned on, they induce noise on the analog signal of the hotwire anemometer, or of any other transducer, at multiples of 120Hz.
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As a test, the leads from to the drive’s logic controller were connected to the AI input channels in order to check the magnitude and frequency of the noise flowing to the DAQ card and were found to be 5 V peak-to-peak at 60 Hz.
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It sounds like you have a ground loop issue. If possible, try totally isolating the stepper controller from the data acquistion AI more than you already have. This could include any of the following:
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Use lower inductance lines for the stepper controller. This will reduce the movement of the ground.
I suspect you have probably been over the above, so you are left with filtering the noise out of the signal. Since it has high harmonic content, a simple low-pass is unlikely to work well. Your best bet is probably to characterize it and use some sort of Fourier filtering. If the relative sizes of the harmonics are always the same, you can take the Fourier transform, find the height of the fundamental, use this to calculate the sizes of the harmonics, delete them from the Fourier transform, and do an inverse Fourier transform to recover your signal. Alternately, you can use a series of narrowband filters to remove the noise, although this will also remove any signal at the same frequencies. It is better if you can improve your circuitry to remove the noise.
Good luck. Let us know if we can help you more.
This account is no longer active. Contact ShadesOfGray for current posts and information.

Step motor control

I would like to buy a hardware and a step motor for control with labview. Could you please offer any configuration . I have to push with this motor a load equal to 1 kg.
Regards

I'm going to assume that you are familiar with National Instruments Offerings for Motion, and that it is not what you are looking for.
Here is a link, just in case: http://www.ni.com/motion/
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Hi guys,
I am starting a project in which I need to rotate a small object (about the size of a calculator), on a stage, in increments of ~2-5 degrees a number of times.
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A stepper motor is probably the way you will have to go if you need to continously rotate the object without returning to an origin position. Like if you need to step it 2 degrees clockwise a thousand times, you need to use a stepper motor. A regular motor with an encoder can be used but you wont have the precise control you are probably looking for. This where a pulsed width modulated motor control unit is typically put into the system. I believe NI has some modules that do this but I have never used them.
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My question is like this. For example I got five points: (0,0) (10,20) (30 40) ( 31 60) (50 65). The request time interval I set as 10ms. This mean that in the first 10ms, the machine should move from (0 0) to (10 20). If it is impossible for the machine to move from (0 0) to (10 20), there are two ways to solve this problem. First is the time interval is 10ms and assume it move to (8 16) within 10ms and take (8 16) as the start point and (30 40) as the end point of the second move. Second is extend the time interval, assume it takes 14ms to move from (0 0) to (10 20). After 14ms, the (10 20) is the new start point for the second move. I think it works as the second ways.If not, the following error will accumulated. Is there anyone can explain something about the closed loop control of stepp motor in detail? Thanks a lot!

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So.. I've attached a stepper motor to a linear stage and so far it's working pretty well. Using a stepper motor driver from Pololu, I've simplified the control of the motor by just using output pulses from the counter output of a PXI-6143. I've tested the motor using the Pulse Train examples in LabVIEW and all is working well.
My goal now is to allow the user to collect data from a pressure sensor, attached to the linear stage, every X number of steps. From what I can tell so far, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the motor step movement is synchronised with the pulse train input. That is to say, if I give the motor a 200 step pulse train, the pulse train ouput is completed at the exact time the motor has moved 200 steps. From this, I've created a VI that moves the motor X steps, aquires the data point, and then repeats this process for the required amount of data points. The problem with this is that the motor movement is not continuous; it stops for a split second to take the data point.
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2. Use an encoder connected to the motor shaft.
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Thanks,
Ryan

Hi Ryan,
Just to cover all the bases, what version of LabVIEW are you using and can you attach your VI? Initially your ideas sound like they should work, do you expect to be nearly maxing out the DAQ?
Thank you,
Deborah Y.
LabVIEW Real-Time Product Marketing Manager
Certified LabVIEW Architect
National Instruments

Stepper motor control - missing MG17Motor ActiveX object

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