4Tronix PiStep - Stepper Motor Control Board

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get my PiStep set up with Scratch please?

I mean actual what kind of Scratch blocks/recipes do I need to compile. I’ve installed ScratchGPIO and all the required upgrades, the problem is simply a gigantic hole in my knowledge of . . . everything.

I’m trying to capture the imagination of two kids with the magic of what they can do, but all they seem to see is me struggling with a pile of wires, which has the ironic effect of putting them off everything :/

The 4Tronix ‘support’ is perhaps out of date. Stepper.py gives movement of one motor (four connected) but the script isn’t running properly. The other script stepctrl.py just won’t run at all.

I really want to get them running in Scratch. So that the kids can see something cool I set up (puppet controller, dancing ‘robot’, etc etc) and want to experiment themselves.

Has anyone any Scratch tips?

Looks like the PiStep or Stepper Motor guide for ScratchGPIO were designed with one or the other in mind. If you look at the pins that PiStep uses and the pins in this guide, they match up. You should just be able to plug on the PiStep, fire up ScratchGPIO and follow the guide here:

http://simplesi.net/scratchgpio/using-stepper-motors/

( Skip to the bottom after the red text for the short and relevant bit )

I’m not up to the standard yet where that little pointer is enough to help out :/

I’m confused about almost every aspect of the boards use, both in scratch and otherwise.

The printing on the board itself is wrong, and the short-bridge (? the little thing to create a short between pins) should be in the opposite position than it shows?

Neither of 4Tronixs’ example scripts (stepper.py and stepctrl.py) run so I have no idea where or how to start and copying the linked Scratch blocks results in . . nothing.

Those reference pages are apparently the only resources so I have no idea how to begin fault-finding.

have you tried contacting 4tronix? they are good people, who lurk on these forums from time but don’t monitor them religiously quite understandably, and I’m sure they’ll be pleased to help you out… us, we can only point at their documentation and hope they make sense to the reader unfortunately.