Hello everyone, I have nema 17 and 23 step motors. I saw that simpleFOC supports L298N and BTS7960B drivers. But what are the best mcus and encoders for this purpose? I have arduino (uno and mega), esp32 and as5600 encoders. Maybe AS5047 or MKS FocEncoder Magnetic Encoder TLE5012B? Or what other high current (5A) driver could be used for these motors? I want to control 6 step motors, so do I need to have 12 drivers?. Does anyone have experience with this?
I saw many topics started similar cases but closed without solution.
For your stepper motors, they have very high pole count, so they are hard to control with FOC. I don’t think either of the driver chips you mentioned is very suitable, they need slow PWM frequencies and won’t have good performance. But for slow motor speed they could be enough.
For the sensor, something with a high resolution is best, AS5600 is not a good choice. The resolution is too low for the stepper and the I2C interface is too slow which will introduce large latency on the sensor data and greatly limit performance.
For the MCU, the ESP32 is best from the ones you mentioned. For the steppers you want a fast MCU to deal with the high pole count.