How to program a stepper motor

You have to follow the same pattern even if you change the pins to which your motor is connected. Since we are using the Arduino stepper library, we can set the speed of the motor using the below line. The speed can range between 0 to for BYJ48 stepper motors. Once the connection is made the hardware should look something like this in the picture below. Now, upload the below program in your Arduino UNO and open the serial monitor.

As discussed earlier we will have to make steps to make one complete rotation, so when we enter the motor will make one complete rotation in clockwise direction by making steps. So, entering will make the motor to rotate half the way in anti-clock wise direction. You can enter any desired values, like entering 1will make the motor to take only one step. Hope you understood the project and enjoyed building it. The complete working of the project is shown in the video below.

If you have any doubts post them on the comment section below our on our forums. The circuit diagram is incorrect. I had it wired how you have it in the diagram and ran the code and it does nothing. I then noticed the way it is wired in the actual real pictures is also different from the diagram.

I then moved the wires around to follow the one in the real pictures of the circuit and it worked. Thanks for pointing it out Michael, and sorry for the mistake. Hi, I'm confused now, the sequence you list is not the same as either the picture or diagram, so I'm struggling to decide which one I need to follow. Is there any chance you could please list the shield's IN pin number to the Arduino pin number i.

Shield IN1 to Arduino Pin 8 or whatever pin it should be? Hey, thanks a lot! This helped me to understand the working of the stepper as well as the coding for the same. DO you need to download the stepper. What is the reason? The stepper motor itself seems to get incredibly hot while idle not moving is there a way to cut the power off to it when it's not in use? Thanks for sharing. Everything work fine, but the questions is what about other variables?

Now lets discuss the operation pricipal of a stepper motor. When we energize a coil of stepper motor, The shaft of stepper motor which is actually a permanent magnet align itself according to poles of energized coil. So when motor coils are energized in a particular sequence, motor shaft tend to align itself according to pole of coils and hence rotates. A small example of energizing operation is given below. When the next coil is energized the shaft again align itself and take a step.

Hence the working principal. In the full step sequence, two coils are energized at the same time and motor shaft rotates. The order in which coils has to be energized is given in the table below. In Half mode step sequence, motor step angle reduces to half the angle in full mode. So the angualar resolution is also increased i. Also in half mode sequence the number of steps gets doubled as that of full mode.

Half mode is usually preffered over full mode. Table below shows the pattern of energizing the coils. Step angle of the stepper motor is defined as the angle traversed by the motor in one step. To calculate step angle,simply divide by number of steps a motor takes to complete one revolution.

As we have seen that in half mode, the number of steps taken by the motor to complete one revolution gets doubled, so step angle reduces to half. As in above examples, Stepper Motor rotating in full mode takes 4 steps to complete a revolution, So step angle can be calculated as So this way we can calculate step angle for any stepper motor. Usually step angle is given in the spec sheet of the stepper motor you are using. Knowing stepper motor's step angle helps you calibrate the rotation of motor also to helps you move the motor to correct angular position.

As seen in above explanation, In every step of the sequence, two wires are always set to opposite polarities. If you know you have a unipolar stepper motor, but are not sure which wire is the one that is in the center of the coils there is a way to figure out which wire it is. Simply measure the resistance between pairs of two wires coming out of the stepper motor. When you find a wire that consistently measures half the resistance when it is paired with all of the other wires, that wire is the one attached to the middle of the coils hence half the resistance.

Naturally, we'll need some wires that will signal to our stepper motor which electromagnet should "turn on". Connect four of the numbered as opposed to lettered digital pins on the uC32 to four of the inputs on the Darlington Transistor Array.

Then, connect the outputs of the transistor pairs, 1C, 2C, 3C, and 4C in this case to an appropriate wire on the stepper motor. What I mean by that is that you want your outputs to attached in a sequential fashion to the coils of the stepper motor.

For example, you would want your first output connected to the first coil, second output for the second coil, and so on. What you do not want to have is your wires all mixed up with the first output connected to the third coil, the second output connected to the second coil, the third output connected to the 4th coil, and the last output connected to the first coil. If you do not know which wire goes to which coil and putting all of the outputs in a row doesn't seem to be working , look for a datasheet diagram showing you which one is which, much like the diagram I found for the 28BYJ48A stepper motor.

To simulate the full step drive with our microcontroller, we will need to make that our signals that we give to the stepper motor are arranged in such a way so that the coils within the stepper motor are energized sequentially. I mentioned this bit earlier, but it's good to double check, otherwise its awkward when you have set everything up right, but nothing happens because a couple of wires are switched.

To energize a particular coil, it needs to receive a low 0V voltage signal so that current is able to flow from the center tapped 5V line to the end of the coil at 0V. With the Darlington transistor pair, this means that we need to digitally write the pin associated with that coil to a logic high voltage.

This nicely makes sense; drive a pin high to turn on an electromagnet and drive a pin low to turn off an electromagnet. In full step drive, two electromagnets need to be turned on at a time, so we will digitally write two adjacent electromagnets such as coils 2 and 3 high and digitally write the remaining two electromagnets low.

We then need to implement a delay for enough time to allow the central shaft to start moving and get to its destination. I have found by trial and error that for my stepper motor this is about 1. After that waiting period, we can turn off one of the electromagnets such as coil 2 and then turn on the next electromagnet coil 4 in this case and then wait before turning off and on the next set of coils.

You can see how this pattern might look in the above picture. The actual code that I used provided in the text file below. Although they are not the fastest type of motor, stepper motors are a great way to rotate something in precise incremental steps with a decent amount of torque for their size. Feel free to check out the video to see what I mean. If you have any questions or comments that you want to share, please feel free to do so and I will do my best to answer any question you may have.

Check out the Digilent Blog to see what other cool things the Digilent team and I are up to! Can a Nema 17 stepper motor in conjunction with a h-bridge move eggs?

The supply will be 12VDC. Question 3 years ago on Introduction. How to connect Nema 17 with reset button, motor control shield and arduino and 12 volt power supply. Well written article. Stepper motors play a key role in Industrial automation. Really learned a lot on how they operate from this post. Thanks for sharing. Question 3 years ago.

I have motor with 4 wires. I have just connected all 4 wires of motor to first 4 wires of driver circuit. Ihave used arduino, but it is not working. Can you please suggest me something in this regard? Show how to program a stepper to do say revolutions and stop. All the examples only show 1 revolution or less. Reply 5 years ago. I had a bit of trouble getting the 5V motor I used to nicely rotate with 3.

I've been having some trouble with motors. I'm completely new to this and I've been playing about with all sorts of arduino sketches from here and their example ones, but all of the motors feel like they're burning rubber on the inside without actually moving the shaft. I've tried dcs, servos and steppers, so I assume it's something I'm doing, but I can't work it out. Has any got any ideas? Any and every is welcome at this stage!

When you opened with "Whether we care to admit it or not, motors can be found all over in our everyday lives" I just imagined someone denying that motors make our phones vibrate and our garage doors open and how hilarious that would be It would be pretty funny, although admittedly I was one of those people admittedly awhile ago that was living in those dark ages thinking that motors were everywhere. I'm not sure how I would've answered onto how a phone vibrated though; that's probably part of the reason of why I am now correctly informed.

Nice instructable. And the stepper motor I have runs at 0. I was wondering if you know another popular array with 4 transistors if necessary that can handle around 1 amp. Reply 6 years ago on Introduction.