Controlling Stepper Speed with MATLAB + Arduino

To keep things short & sweet...

• Motive: I want to control the rotational speed of my stepper motor using MATLAB. Why? Cause there's also some stuff I want to plot while it runs in MATLAB.
• Hardware: stepper motor + driver + Arduino
• Problem: MATLAB has only a few controls for Arduino PWM: writePWMVoltage, writePWMDutyCycle
• Solution Needed: I need a way to control the shape of the square wave to control the stepper speed--i.e., frequency, duty cycle, and even peak would be great

The wave needs to bounce between high (5V) or low (0V) with a 50% duty cycle, but user-control over the frequency (e.g., freq = 1/pulseDelay).

So what are some clever ways to do this?

Approach 1: One is to set up a while loop in which you manually send a pulse every pulseDelay seconds. However, you reach a limit in communication speed between MATLAB and the Arduino (e.g., no speed change between pulseDelay = 1E-3 and pulseDelay = 1E-6). It also moves way too slow.

writePWMVoltage(a,'D9',5); % set direction, CCW
delay = 1E-6; % time between steps, [s]

while 1
    writePWMVoltage(a,'D10',5); % take one step
    pause(delay) % pause
    writePWMVoltage(a,'D10',0); % take one step
    pause(delay) % pause
end

Approach 2: Create a square wave function and try to get writePWMVoltage to write it. This doesn't work, as this function only takes scalar double between 0 and 5.

writePWMVoltage(a,'D9',5); % set direction 

time = 0:0.1:60; 
sqrWave = 2.5*(square(time)+1);

for count = 1:length(time)
    writePWMVoltage(a,'D10',sqrWave);
end

Approach 3: The only thing that works smoothly: writePWMDutyCycle, but I have no control over speed which is what I really want. OR at least to know what speed I'm going at while this line of code executes...

while  1
    writePWMDutyCycle(a, 'D10', 0.5); % PWM signal with 50% duty cycle
end

Suggestions are very welcome! I'd love to use MATLAB for this task, but if the support, functions, documentation, etc. are not there for this project that's fine--I'll switch back to Arduino.

[Lucas Warwaruk]

Have you made any progress on this? I'm running into the exact same issue. I'd like to use Matlab to control a NEMA 23 and TB6600 driver. I'm trying to use your approach 1, but as you alluded to in your question, it's way too slow.

[Luke G.]

Lucas, sorry - I ended up just sticking with Approach 3 because it was the most reliable and speed isn't absolutely critical to my application. Though I would love to know if you (or anyone else) figures it out! Cheers