Week 4 was another interesting look at stepper motors. There are two main kinds of stepper motor, unipolar and bipolar. The stepper motors use phases with a magnetic field that iterates to make it turn. Bipolar stepper motors are slightly more complicated to orientate the magnetic field but can be simplified. The unipolar stepper motor and stepper motors a like are simple, unipolar is the kind I used today.
I used the stepper motor in a circuit to practice using it in different ways during this lecture. First of all I tried to get it working and stepping with a simple use of code, but I was helped by a colleague Dan Bowers to get it working as the stepper motors were spread across all people on the course. My simple stepping project looked like this…
The chip in the middle of the bread board was used to communicate with the stepper motor but I cannot remember what it was called. Like other components the stepper motor had to be wired correctly to include pins 8,9,10,11 to create phases for the steps. By adding a potentiometer similar to the diagram (below) and adapting the code we were able to control the speed the stepper motor turned. As well as mapping the value that we code also using an LDR to control the speed.
This code was used for the potentiometer with a knob…
Which was very similar to the code used with the LDR…
These experiments and challenges all contributed to being a bit more competent about how to wire a circuit with different components and code to use these.
Physical Computing Experimentation 