Hi all. The last time I designed a stepper motor into a project was a
long time ago. I used a ULN2803 darlington array and did the stepping
in software. It worked ok.

I've just started looking into steppers again, and it seems there are
a bunch of new chips on the market that take care of a lot of the work
for you. I'm happy to get one chip that will handle generating steps
as well as handling the higher power to the windings. That will just
make things easier on me both in the software and hardware. Setting a
pin to choose the direction and then just sending pulses seems quite
simple.

However there seem to be a bewildering array of these chips out there.
I'd love to standardize on a chip that will drive unipolar and bipolar
motors and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Something easily available
at Digikey would be nice too. The Toshiba TB6560
(http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=TB6560AHQO-ND)
seems ok for bipolars. Is there something out there than would handle
both? These aren't huge motors so I would say anything up to an amp or
two would be good.

What do you use, and why that particular chip?

Thanks!

Josh
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