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“A stepper motor is a brushless, synchronous electric motor that can divide a full rotation into a large number of steps. When commutated electronically, the motor’s position can be controlled precisely, without any feedback mechanism” (citation from Wikipedia) Here are a few links that will educate you on what stepper motors are, how to understand their operation and how to control them. PMinMO.com has a wiki that provides a good basic introduction to stepper motors, related control mechanisms, and software associated with them. A slightly more technical description on the stepper motor itself can be found on the Gecko Drive site |
December 7th, 2007
Here is a site that gives some microcontroller interface instructions also:
http://www.imagesco.com/articles/picstepper/01.html
April 1st, 2008
I recently built a simple robot that could maneuver in all 4 ordinal directions. I used stepper motors because they allow you control the exact amount of rotation (using x amount of steps.) this makes it far easier for the robot to be steered accurately. I’m not going back to servo motors, that’s for sure.
http://www.linengineering.com/