A3967
How it Works
Stepper motors vary from regular DC motors in that, rather than just spinning in one direction or another, they can spin in very precise increments. Imagine a motor on an RC airplane. The motor spins very fast in on direction or another. You can vary the speed with the amount of power given to the motor, but you cannot tell the propeller to stop at a specific position. Now imagine a printer. There are lots of moving parts inside a printer, including motors. One such motor acts as the paper feed, spinning rollers that move the piece of paper as ink is being printed on it. This motor needs to be able to move the paper an exact distance to be able to print the next line of text or next line of an image. There is another motor attached to a threaded rod that moves the print head back on forth. Again, that threaded rod needs to be moved an exact amount to print one letter after another. This is where stepper motors come in handy.
Stepper motors can move an exact amount of degrees (or steps) when told to do so. This gives you total control over the motor, allowing you to move it to an exact location and hold that position. It does so by powering coils inside the motor for very short periods of time. The trade off is that you have to power the motor all the time to keep it in the position that you desire. We won’t go into too much detail here, but you can check out this Wikipedia article on stepper motors for all the nitty-gritty information. All you need to know for now is that, to move a stepper motor, you tell it to move a certain number of steps in one direction or the other, and tell it the speed at which to step in that direction.
There are numerous varieties of stepper motors as well as driver boards with which to control them. The methods described here can be used to infer how to use other motors and drivers not mentioned in this tutorial. However, it is always recommended that you consult the datasheets and guides of the motors and drivers specific to the models you have.
Assembly
Here we will discuss how to assemble, hook up and control your motor with firmware uploaded to the Arduino.
