There's lots of great resources out there about Stepper Motors, how they work and what kinds are available, I'd recommend
- A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Chip At the heart of the module is a Microstepping Driver from Allegro – A4988. It’s small in stature (only 0.8″ × 0.6″) but still packs a punch.
- It can control both speed and spinning direction of a bipolar stepper motor like NEMA 17 with just two pins. How cool is that! A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Chip. At the heart of the module is a Microstepping Driver from Allegro – A4988. It’s small in stature (only 0.8″ × 0.6″) but still packs a punch.
- Spin two DC motors or step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper with up to 1.2A per channel using the DRV8833. This motor driver chip is a nice alternative to the TB6612 driver. Like that chip, you get 2 full H-bridges, but this chip is better for low voltage uses (can run from 2.7V up to 10.8V motor power) and has built in current limiting capability.
- This small post shows how to control speed and direction of rotation of bipolar stepper motor using Arduino UNO board and L293D motor driver chip. The stepper motor used in this example is just a PC CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) drive which has 4 wires. Proteus simulation of the example is provided at the end of the topic.
I had acquired some Stepper Motors from Ebay, that didn't work well with the Adafruit Motor Shield. Looking at the specs the problem here was the resistance/current/voltage rating;
Rated Current/phase2.0A
9 rows The device has two H-bridge drivers and a microstepping indexer, and is intended to drive a bipolar stepper motor. The output driver block consists of N-channel power MOSFET’s configured as full H-bridges to drive the motor windings.
Phase Resistance1.4ohms
Voltage2.8V
So, for Stepper motors, the resistance per phase is a constant. The Rated current is the MAXIMUM current the motor will take before bad things happen, and the voltage is the calculated voltage that will give a constant current at the rated current, for the motors resistance (V = I x R, V = 2.0A x 1.4Ohm = 2.8V).
The Adafruit stepper motor shield cant supply 2A,and has trouble with voltages below about 5V, so couldn't properly run my motors (they jittered but didn't smoothly move).
So, I got some stepsticks and decided to wire them up to my Arduino.
Other Materials
For this I also used;
An Arduino Uno, but any Arduino compatible should do
Stepper Motor Drivers And Controllers
A Stepstick, or compatible stepper driver using a A4988 or DRV8825
A 12V power supply
James bond download. A breadboard
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Some hookup wire, I used solid Cat5 strands.
Stepper Motor Driver Ic L293d
I also used a couple of LEDs and some 220Ohm resistors