Jan. 26th, 2010Picture #251 out of 279
My Mag loop controller is taking shape nicely, all PIC functions are working on my dev board, the last piece in the puzzle was to design a stepper motor controller, I've decided to use a dedicated driver chip, SLA7024M, but was looking to couple this up with some programmable device to implement the state logic.
After looking at professional boards, most seemed to use a GAL16V8 chip, unfortunately I don't have the programming tools for this chip, so was forced to look at other alternatives. Yesterday I decided to try using an fpga, perhaps completely over the top, but I have the MAXII dev board here used as a Byte-Blaster.
I've never written anything in Verilog, let alone played seriously with Quartus, however after studying Altera's application note 488, I now have code that not only compiles, but runs on the dev board driving LED's, clearly demonstrating the state logic to drive the SLA7024M.
A small step perhaps, but I'm over the moon :)
I can now start the schematic with confidence that this interface will work.
