More mechanical wooden silliness

[shoeshine]

That's fantastic Paul,

I'd love a little detail on your Arduino set-up. I have a new Uno sitting on my bench that I have been intending to play with (so far I've managed to get the time to make it blink an LED) Several of my projects lend themselves well to motorization. Any jump starts on the sketches or wiring would be most welcome.

Thanks
Chris

[lepton]

Chris-
Setup was very straight forward.
Two required changes to the wooden parts -
1) the base plate was modified by adding the required mounting screws for the stepper as well as a clearance hole for the shaft.
2) new drive gear with a 'D' shaped hole for the stepper shaft.
Specifics will vary based on the stepper. Get your motor in hand(or at least the datasheet) before making the parts.

For the electronics I used 3 off the shelf pieces:

Arduino ($30.00):
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?ma...products_id=50

Motor Shield ($19.50):
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?ma...products_id=81

The stepper ($14.00):
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=324

You can reduce the cost by at least 1/2 by going with a Arduino clone kit and building your own motor controller. The schematics are all open source.
I opted for speed of development vs. low cost.

The code is very straight forward. All the 'heavy lifting' is done be the Adafruit Stepper library.

The code couldn't be easier:
[CODE]#include <AFMotor.h>

// Tell the AFMotor library that the motor has 200 steps/rev and is connected to motor port 1
AF_Stepper motor(200, 1);


void setup() {
// Set speed of stepper to 40 RPM
motor.setSpeed(40);

}

void loop() { // just like it sounds - the following sequence will repeat as long as the CPU is running.

// Rotate the stepper shaft 80 steps using both coils(higher torque)
motor.step(80, FORWARD, DOUBLE);

// Pause for 2 seconds
delay(2000);

// Rotate the stepper shaft 80 steps in the opposite direction
motor.step(80, BACKWARD, DOUBLE);

// Pause for 2 seconds
delay(2000);
}[/CODE]

[shoeshine]

Sweet, thanks Paul.

up till now I have been playing with small hobby motors, gearboxes and CR servos. Strange considering I use a CNC machine, but I have not thought to work with small steppers. Good to have a source for low cost small units. (though adafruit was sold out of the exact item, I was able to get a similar spec stepper from sparkfun once I thought to look for it)

nice to get the code in the adafruit stepper library, That will simplify matters considerably.

again thanks, though I have not had a chance to play with it yet, I can already see a ton of uses for this set-up.

appreciate the info.

Chris