DRV8434 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier

Yes. To avoid damaging your stepper motor, you want to avoid exceeding the rated current, which is 600 mA in this instance. All of our stepper motor drivers let you limit the maximum current, so as long as you set the limit below the rated current, you will be within spec for your motor, even if the voltage exceeds the rated voltage. The voltage rating is just the voltage at which each coil draws the rated current, so the coils of your stepper motor will draw 600 mA at 3.9 V. By using a higher voltage along with active current limiting, the current is able to ramp up faster, which lets you achieve higher step rates than you could using the rated voltage.

If you do want to use a lower motor supply voltage for other reasons, consider using our DRV8834 or STSPIN-220 low-voltage stepper motor drivers.

Yes, you do! Setting the current limit on your stepper motor driver carrier is essential to making sure that it runs properly. An appropriate current limit also ensures that your motor is not allowed to draw more current than it or your driver can handle, since that is likely to damage one or both of them.

For the DRV8434A Stepper Motor Driver Carrier the current limit is set by adjusting the board’s potentiometer. We strongly recommend using a multimeter to measure the VREF voltage while setting the current limit so you can be sure you set it to an appropriate value (just turning the pot randomly until things seem to work is not a good approach). The following video has more details on setting the current limit:

Setting the current limit on the DRV8434S SPI Stepper Motor Driver Carrier, 2A Max. Current Limit is done through its SPI interface (this is very different from most of our other stepper motor driver carriers, which have their current limits set through their on-board potentiometers). The DRV8434S SPI Stepper Motor Driver Carrier, 2A Max defaults to its maximum possible current limit setting on start-up, which is much more current than the board can safely deliver, so you will need to set the current limit to an appropriate value for your stepper motor before enabling the driver outputs to prevent damage to the board. This is done by adjusting the TRQ_DAC bits in the CTRL1 register. The DRV8434S datasheet has more information on how to set the current limit through the SPI interface, and our Arduino library includes example sketches showing how to implement this in software.

For the DRV8434S SPI Stepper Motor Driver Carrier, Potentiometer for Max Current Limit, the current limit can be adjusted through both the onboard potentiometer and SPI. If the TRQ_DAC scaling factor at its left at its default of 100%, the potentiometer can be used alone to set the current limit, like with the DRV8434A. Otherwise, the TRQ_DAC value set through SPI is used to further scale the current limit set with the potentiometer.