Hello all,
I am currently trying to design a PCB that is able to mount an Arduino Uno and a Big Easy driver to acuate a stepper motor. After hours of searching, I cannot seem to find the lib or footprint modules needed to incorporate the Big Easy Driver v1.2 into my schematic. I am reaching out to everyone in the Kicad community who have also had this issue to see how/where they managed to achieve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I never heard about the “big easy driver” before. A simple search does find zipped eagle projects within half a minute on:
But also directly from the sparkfun website:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12859
It is quite easy to make a custom KiCad footprint for such a module. In general all the holes for such modules fit on a 100mils grid, so you just put some pads on such a grid, draw a rectangle around it and you’re 80% done. (Edit: Oops, this is not true for the “big easy driver”. Turns out that one is not so easy after all).
An alternative are the “step stick” modules. This seems to be a more common form factor and is used in a lot of 3D printers. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=stepstick&iax=images&ia=images
KiCad has quite good editors for both schematic symbols and PCB footprints, and this is one of the reasons I started using KiCad in the first place (about 10 years ago). Big libraries are nice to have and can save you some time, but when you have decent editors you can make all the library parts you need yourself. Inclusive footprints ans schematic symbols for self designed parts that do not exist anywhere outside of your own project.
Also, I was a bit unpleasantly surprised by the price of the “easy big driver”. Stepstick drivers start at around EUR1.5, depending on which driver IC is used. Trinamic makes some really good stepper motor driver IC’s (More torque, cooler motors and much less noise).
A lot of newcomers think they need to find a specific symbol and footprint for a daughter board. As mentioned, it’s very easy to use the symbol and footprint editors to make your own yellow box for the symbol and a couple of rows of pins for the footprint. Have a look at this topic for someone else with a similar use case: Trying to import schematic and layout for Arduino Shield
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.