PyTic2 is a Python wrapper for the Pololu Tic Stepper Motor Controller series. It is similar and inspired by the PyTic driver developed by the Allen Institute. The PyTic2 driver is intended to be used on a Raspberry PI and uses the I2C interface for the communication with the Pololu Tic Stepper Motor Controllers. The API consists of the commands defined in the Tic Stepper Motor Controller User’s Guide

The wrapper has been tested with Tic T825 and T500 motor controllers.

The communication with Pololu Stepper driver is done over the I2C interface and the smbus2 driver is required. The smbus2 driver can be pip installed.

pip install smbus2

Please refer to the Section 15.8 in the Pololu documentation for more detailed information

You can pip install the wrapper directly from github with the command if the setuptools package is installed:

pip install git+https://github.com/SRievers/pytic2

The wrapper library can otherwize be git cloned with the command:

git clone https://github.com/SRievers/pytic2

Before the use of the wrapper, the Motor Controller control mode has to be set to Serial/I2C/USB and assigned an unique device number. This can be done with the Pololu Control Center that can be downloaded from the Pololu website.

The pytic2 object can be instantiated after having imported the pytic2 module. The Motor Controller commands are thereafter available as the object methods.

from smbus2 import SMBus
from pytic2 import pytic2

DEVICE_NUMBER = 20

bus = SMBus(3)
tic = pytic2(bus, DEVICE_NUMBER)

tic.setStepMode(3)            # = 2^-3 = 1/8
tic.setCurrentLimit(8)        # = 8*32 mA = 256 mA
tic.setMaxSpeed(4000000)
tic.setMaxAccel(40000)
tic.setMaxDecel(40000)

tic.haltAndSetPosition(0)
tic.energize()
tic.exitSafeStart()
tic.setTargetPosition(500)
tic.setTargetPosition(-500)