A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier

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A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier.fzpz (132.8 KB)

The solder pads(not sure if that is the right term) on this board are very small compared to other components which will make soldering very difficult. How can I edit the pads to give me more room to work with?

Thanks in advance.

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If you are familiar with a svg editor such as Inkscape you could edit the pcb svg to increase the pad size (which looks to be currently too small), or I could modify it to a better pad size for you.

edit: that said you would probably be happier with one of the proper a4988 parts (which have breadboard and schematic which yours doesn’t) that are available in core parts. If you enter a4988 in the parts search (the magnifying glass) and press the enter key, two of them come up. Although yours appears to be .5 in spacing rather than .6 as the core parts look to be (and is more common), so if that’s what your part really is I’d need to make you a different part from one of the core ones with your pcb svg in it (with the pads fixed).

Peter

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Peter thanks for the reply. I’ll try editing the part myself. I’d like to learn for future projects.

I’m a bit worried about the spacing you mentioned. I received my pcb yesterday but didn’t have time to test fit components.

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To be honest Peter I was thinking that the .5 and .6 referred to the pin spacing but now I’m not sure. Can you please explain further the spacing.

Thanks

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Ok never mind. Lol. I figured it out. It’s the pin spacing across the component.

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The easy way to do this is to increase the radius of the pads with xml editor in Inkscape. If you do pretty much anything else the x/y coords of the pad will move and cause problems. What I did was copy / paste a pad from a header (as the headers have the .038 hole size you need for .1 pins) in to the pcb svg drawing, then copy the radius from the header pad in to all the current pads using xml editor. Then copy the entire style command from the header in to the pad. Note there is an Inkscape bug in 0.92.2 that it loses the change when you change an attribute which it converts to a style (for example if stroke-width is separate and you change it from 10 to 20, when you set it Inkscape will convert it from in line to a style command but retain the original value of 10). So what I do is select an attribute (with no changes), set it (which converts to style) then replace the entire style with what I want and set that. There are tutorials on parts creation and I highly encourage everyone to learn parts making, it just has a large learning curve :slight_smile: . A number of us are happy to help if you have problems as the more people making parts the better. Yes the spacing is the one between the rows as you have discovered. If you want breadboard and schematic for your part as well it would be fairly easy to adapt either one in core by replacing their copy of the pcb svg with yours. You would probably need to change the connector numbering to match that used but the ones in core though. Here are pointers to the parts making tutorials:

Peter