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Unipolar Stepper Motor
This page shows two examples on how to drive a unipolar stepper motor. These motors can be found in old floppy drives and are easy to control. The one we use has 6 connectors of which one is power (VCC) and the other four are used to drive the motor sending synchronous signals.
The first example is the basic code to make the motor spin in one direction. It is aiming those that have no knowledge in how to control stepper motors. The second example is coded in a more complex way, but allows to make the motor spin at different speeds, in both directions, and controlling both from a potentiometer.
The prototyping board has been populated with a 10K potentiomenter that we connect to an analog input, and a ULN2003A driver. This chip has a bunch of transistors embedded in a single housing. It allows the connection of devices and components that need much higher current than the ones that the ATMEGA8 from our Arduino board can offer.
Picture of a protoboard supporting the ULN2003A and a potentiometer
Example 1: Simple example
/* Stepper Copal
* -------------
*
* Program to drive a stepper motor coming from a 5'25 disk drive
* according to the documentation I found, this stepper: "[...] motor
* made by Copal Electronics, with 1.8 degrees per step and 96 ohms
* per winding, with center taps brought out to separate leads [...]"
* [http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/example.html]
*
* It is a unipolar stepper motor with 5 wires:
*
* - red: power connector, I have it at 5V and works fine
* - orange and black: coil 1
* - brown and yellow: coil 2
*
* (cleft) 2005 DojoDave for K3
* http://www.0j0.org | http://arduino.berlios.de
*
* @author: David Cuartielles
* @date: 20 Oct. 2005
*/
int motorPin1 = 8;
int motorPin2 = 9;
int motorPin3 = 10;
int motorPin4 = 11;
int delayTime = 500;
void setup() {
pinMode(motorPin1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(motorPin2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(motorPin3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(motorPin4, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
digitalWrite(motorPin1, HIGH);
digitalWrite(motorPin2, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin3, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin4, LOW);
delay(delayTime);
digitalWrite(motorPin1, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin2, HIGH);
digitalWrite(motorPin3, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin4, LOW);
delay(delayTime);
digitalWrite(motorPin1, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin2, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin3, HIGH);
digitalWrite(motorPin4, LOW);
delay(delayTime);
digitalWrite(motorPin1, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin2, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin3, LOW);
digitalWrite(motorPin4, HIGH);
delay(delayTime);
}
Example 2: Stepper Unipolar Advanced
/* Stepper Unipolar Advanced
* -------------------------
*
* Program to drive a stepper motor coming from a 5'25 disk drive
* according to the documentation I found, this stepper: "[...] motor
* made by Copal Electronics, with 1.8 degrees per step and 96 ohms
* per winding, with center taps brought out to separate leads [...]"
* [http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/example.html]
*
* It is a unipolar stepper motor with 5 wires:
*
* - red: power connector, I have it at 5V and works fine
* - orange and black: coil 1
* - brown and yellow: coil 2
*
* (cleft) 2005 DojoDave for K3
* http://www.0j0.org | http://arduino.berlios.de
*
* @author: David Cuartielles
* @date: 20 Oct. 2005
*/
int motorPins[] = {8, 9, 10, 11};
int count = 0;
int count2 = 0;
int delayTime = 500;
int val = 0;
void setup() {
for (count = 0; count < 4; count++) {
pinMode(motorPins[count], OUTPUT);
}
}
void moveForward() {
if ((count2 == 0) || (count2 == 1)) {
count2 = 16;
}
count2>>=1;
for (count = 3; count >= 0; count--) {
digitalWrite(motorPins[count], count2>>count&0x01);
}
delay(delayTime);
}
void moveBackward() {
if ((count2 == 0) || (count2 == 1)) {
count2 = 16;
}
count2>>=1;
for (count = 3; count >= 0; count--) {
digitalWrite(motorPins[3 - count], count2>>count&0x01);
}
delay(delayTime);
}
void loop() {
val = analogRead(0);
if (val > 540) {
// move faster the higher the value from the potentiometer
delayTime = 2048 - 1024 * val / 512 + 1;
moveForward();
} else if (val < 480) {
// move faster the lower the value from the potentiometer
delayTime = 1024 * val / 512 + 1;
moveBackward();
} else {
delayTime = 1024;
}
}
References
In order to work out this example, we have been looking into quite a lot of documentation. The following links may be useful for you to visit in order to understand the theory underlying behind stepper motors:
- information about the motor we are using - here
- basic explanation about steppers - here
- good PDF with basic information - here