I thought it would be a good idea to have custom made stepper motor controllers to get full control via SPI using one pin on an Arduino for each motor, daisy chaining the SPI bus. This gives us all kind of useful features such as current control, overheating protection, temperature warnings, soft start/stop etc.

The PCB itself is used as a heat sink for the SMT mosfets so special attention has to be made to heat dissipation. They also need to stack on top of each other with headers for the SPI, supply voltage and ground.

Boards are just about ready to go to manufacture:

There's also an evaluation board available for the ST L6482 main chip + mosfets which is very reasonably priced from Mouser which I can use if these boards themselves are too difficult to get working straight away:

http://www.mouser.co.uk/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=EVAL6482Hvirtualkey51120000virtualkey511-EVAL6482H