Stepper motor hook up

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Today I bought a stepper motor to play with, after 12 hours of struggling with it, I haven't been able to figure out how to connect it to an Arduino. All the pictures and circuits of easy tutorials I found on Google had 5 wires, and those with 4 wires had different color coding anyway. But a 4-wire doesn't make sense!

Because I forgot to buy one, and Stepper motor hook up can't get my hands on one for a couple of days. And this is exactly the source of confusion: On arduino website, the sample circuit's stepper has 4 wires and is directly connected to a driver IC a LMxxxand the driver is connected to Arduino.

Since I do not have a driver at hand, I need to convert the circuit so it works with 4 transistors instead.

But what the wiring should be? If it had 5 wires I would have done it like this schematics. Your motor is Bi-polar.

It has two windings and you need to use a circuit that constantly inverts the polarity of the supply to the coils. This is done with an H-bridge that operates as four switches. You need one H-bridge per coil, so you'll need two of them to control your stepper.

In practice these switches are either mosfets or transistors. Refer to the below articles for stepper motor driving: Unipolar ones are much easier to work but more expensive to make with as it's just a matter of turning the right coils Stepper motor hook up and off in the right order - so most simple tutorials are for those.

Bipolar ones, though, require a pair of H-bridges to get them working properly. Not only to you have to turn the coils on and off in the right order, but you have to switch them to the right polarity at the right time.

I don't normally recommend instructables as some of the things on there are downright dangerous, but there is an example on there of driving a bipolar stepper Stepper motor hook up from an Arduino: By clicking "Post Your Answer", you acknowledge that you have read our updated terms of serviceprivacy policy and cookie policyand that your continued use of the website is subject to these policies.

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