This package provides Python control of stepper motors.  See Jones'
`Control of Stepping Motors`_ for an excellent stepper overview.
Supports full and half stepping of motors with one or two power lines
and 4 drains, or one or two drains and 4 power lines.  Basically any
motor with 4 variable lines, and it would be easy to extend it to
other cases.


Installation
============

Packages
--------

Gentoo
~~~~~~

I've packaged stepper for Gentoo.  You need layman_ and my `wtk
overlay`_.  Install with::

    # emerge -av app-portage/layman
    # layman --add wtk
    # emerge -av sci-libs/stepper


Dependencies
------------

Stepper has no explicit dependencies outside of the core Python
modules, but for real-world results you will need a way to drive the
stepper's digital control lines.  A general way to do this is with the
pycomedi wrapper around the Comedilib_ library, as shown in the
Stepper doctest.

You will also need nose for testing.

===========  =================  =====================
Package      Debian_            Gentoo_
===========  =================  =====================
Nose_        python-nose        dev-python/nose
Pycomedi_                       dev-python/pycomedi
===========  =================  =====================


Installing by hand
------------------

Stepper is available as a Git_ repository::

    $ git clone git://tremily.us/stepper.git

See the homepage_ for details.  To install the checkout, run the
standard::

    $ python setup.py install


Usage
=====

See the module docstrings for simple examples.


Testing
=======

Run internal unit tests with::

    $ nosetests --with-doctest --doctest-tests stepper.py


Licence
=======

This project is distributed under the `GNU General Public License
Version 3`_ or greater.


Author
======

W. Trevor King
wking@tremily.us
Copyright 2008-2012


.. _Control of Stepping Motors: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/
.. _layman: http://layman.sourceforge.net/
.. _wtk overlay: http://blog.tremily.us/posts/Gentoo_overlay/
.. _Debian: http://www.debian.org/
.. _Gentoo: http://www.gentoo.org/
.. _Comedilib: http://www.comedi.org/
.. _Nose: http://somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose/
.. _Pycomedi: http://blog.tremily.us/posts/pycomedi/
.. _Git: http://git-scm.com/
.. _homepage: http://blog.tremily.us/posts/stepper/
.. _GNU General Public License Version 3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt