I have been doing some research lately on stepper motors, and have thought of some cool projects that could be done for them. I actually had to do some studying on what exactly a stepper motor was, and how they were used. Through my studies I have found some cool sites on them, and wanted to pass on the knowledge.
Wikipedia probably has the best beginners guide that I have seen. You can see the above picture. A stepper motor basically has a set number of coils. In the above picture you see 4 coils. The center rotor has teeth on it. All four sets of coils have teeth which are offset from the teeth. If you power the top coil, the teeth of the center gear will align with it. You would then power the right coil, and the teeth would rotate clockwise a few degrees. You would continue to power the stepper motor by alternating the four coils in a clockwise (or counter clockwise) manner.
You can grab stepper motors out of old floppy drives. They can be used in all sorts of applications. One example is in a robot, if you need to keep track of how many turns a motor has made. You can use a microcontroller to pulse through the sequences of coils in a motor.
Go to this site for more examples of uses of a stepper motor, and how to control them.
2 Responses to “Stepper motor”
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I had a project on electric motors for my collage. Your blog helped me a lot. Thank-you very much
Nice basic info for those who are interested to know about stepper motor.
I found this nice website that I think very much gathers information about stepper motor
from around the web. You can to this link : http://stepper-motor.blogspot.com
Enjoy!