One driver, three modes, and an onboard interface built to make precision dosing simple.
The Boxer iD driver was developed to solve a problem that's common across the peristaltic pump market: manufacturers often need a single, adaptable motor controller that can serve multiple products and applications, rather than a bespoke driver for every variant. Designing one driver flexible enough to do that — without making it complicated for the end user — was the core challenge behind this project.
Project aim
The goal was to create a custom stepper motor driver, complete with an onboard LCD screen and user interface, capable of working flexibly across a range of peristaltic pumps. Rather than being built for one specific application, the driver needed to operate reliably across several very different use cases — from precise fluid dosing to straightforward manual running to full external control — all from the same hardware platform.
To achieve that, the driver was designed to operate in three distinct modes, each tailored to a different way customers and end users would want to run their pump.
Three modes, one driver
1. Run Mode
Run Mode gives the operator the simplest possible way to use the pump: set the required speed and go. The interface is designed so a user can get the pump running quickly and accurately, with straightforward control over speed, timing, and acceleration, without needing to understand the more advanced dosing or calibration functionality underneath. This is the mode most end users will interact with day to day.
2. Dose Mode
Dose Mode is where the driver's flexibility really shows. Peristaltic pumps are frequently used to dispense precise volumes of fluid, and different fluids — with different viscosities and flow characteristics — behave differently at the same pump speed. Dose Mode allows quick calibration and reliable dosing across a range of fluids, so the same driver can be configured for water one day and a more viscous liquid the next, without any change to the underlying hardware or firmware.
3. Analogue Mode (External 0–5V)
For customers who want to integrate the pump into a larger system with its own control electronics, Analogue Mode lets the iD driver behave like a conventional stepper motor driver, operating in 1/256 microstepping mode and taking its speed reference from an external 0–5V control signal. This mode effectively turns the Boxer iD into a drop-in component within a bigger automated system, rather than a standalone user-facing product — extending its usefulness well beyond the pumps it was originally designed for.
Together, these three modes mean the same physical driver can serve as a simple manual pump controller, a precision dosing system, or an externally-driven component — covering a much wider range of customer applications from a single design. That flexibility keeps unit costs down for the customer while still giving them a genuinely powerful set of options to choose from.
Key challenge: a two-tier control interface
The biggest technical challenge in the project wasn't the motor control itself — it was designing a user interface capable of supporting everything from quick day-to-day operation through to detailed calibration, all through a single onboard LCD screen, without overwhelming the average user.
The solution was a two-tier control interface:
Tier one — the main interface. This is what most users interact with. It allows the pump to be run and lets basic settings — speed, timing, and acceleration — be adjusted quickly and intuitively, without exposing any of the underlying calibration complexity.
Tier two — deep calibration. Beneath the main interface sits a second tier designed for setup and fine-tuning. Here, a user can run the pump for a fixed period, physically measure how much of a given fluid has been dosed, and enter that measured value back into the controller. From that single data point, the driver automatically calibrates itself — calculating the run time required to dose a specific fixed volume of that particular fluid in future. This turns what would otherwise be a manual, trial-and-error calibration process into a guided, self-correcting one, and it's what makes Dose Mode genuinely practical for a wide range of fluids rather than just the ones the driver was originally tuned for.
Building this two-tier structure into a compact, onboard LCD interface — rather than requiring a PC, app, or external configuration tool — was central to the design brief. It meant every part of the driver's setup and operation, from a first-time calibration through to daily use, could be handled on the device itself.
A driver that's flexible at its core
What makes the Boxer iD driver stand out isn't any single feature, but the way run mode, dose mode, and analogue mode combine with the two-tier interface to make one piece of hardware genuinely adaptable. A pump manufacturer doesn't need a different driver for a simple manual pump, a precision dosing product, and an OEM component destined for someone else's control system — the same Boxer iD driver, with the same core hardware, can serve all three.
That flexibility is deliberate. By building adaptability into the driver from the ground up, rather than treating each application as a separate design exercise, it's possible to keep development and production costs down while still giving customers a powerful, application-ready range of options — a philosophy that runs through much of Zikodrive's approach to custom motor control design.
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