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What is the difference between a stepper motor driver and a stepper motor controller? Let’s find it out.

A stepper motor (or step motor) is a brushless, synchronous electric motor that can divide a full rotation into a large number of steps.

Stepper Motor Driver is a very useful unit which can help the stepper motor to replace the servo motor in some conditions and save you money. A stepper motor driver with microstepping can smooth your step motor and give you wanted torque. Jump in here, a bipolar stepper motor driver can drive 4 lead wires bipolar stepper motor, as well 6 lead wires unipolar stepper motor and 8 lead wires step motor. Stepper motor driver is an open loop system without feedback.

After known the stepper motor driver, so what’s a stepper motor controller? Let’s take it simple way, for sample, UIM240 parallel port stepper motor driver, UIM241 serial port stepper motor controller and UIM242 stepper motor controller with CAN protocol, what’s the difference there? Stepper motor controller is a programming system with a microcontroller built-in but not stepper motor driver. To me, stepper motor controller is more intelligent than stepper motor driver. If we put a sensor terminal on a UIM242 CANBus network stepper motor controller, the thing will be that we will get feedback from the stepper controller to user device. A closed-loop feedback system is fulfilled. The speed of the UIM242 stepper controller is 1 Mega bps that mean you can run a stepper motor 2000rpm under 16^th resolution. What you get is a servo stepper motor by using this kind of stepper controller.