Controlling a Stepper Motor with Arduino

[jan25]

Hi all,

I am making a timelapse slider and am having trouble controlling the 42BYG stepper motor from an arduino. Any suggestions of IC’s I could use to enable me to do this? I need to be able to drive the motor one step at a time.

Many thanks

 

[rjenkinsgb]

For a four-wire stepper motor, you need two full-bridge power drivers, one for each winding.

Also, due to the inductance of the windings, for anything other than extremely low speeds, they must be driven from a high voltage supply using constant current drivers.

The simplest approach is to use one of the readily available stepper motor driver modules such as these:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07XRF8YPX/

There are arduino libraries for controlling steppers using modules such as those.

The motor supply to the driver module should be somewhere in the 12V - 24V range.

The modules also include microstepping, so the motor can be positioned to an accuracy of eg. 1/16 it's full step angle.