I know it’s around spring break for many of our readers in academia, but here at Digilent, we just can’t get enough of Richard Wall’s work — whether he’s vacationing or not! Last week, we learned about methods of creating software time delays to pace processor operations. That project also demonstrates used time delays for signal conditioning. This laid the groundwork for us to talk about stepper motors and finite state machines (FSM) this week.

The purpose of this project is to investigate the application of software-based state machines to controlling the speed, direction of rotation, and operational mode of stepper motors. You will need to know about both digital I/O control and using delays with microcontrollers in order to provide real-time open loop control, but you can check those out here and here (respectively).

Enjoy any vacation time you have and keep checking back to the blog to learn more about cool ways to use microcontrollers!