In this episode of The Maker Show, Bret Stateham will show you how to drive a stepper motor with an Arduino.

Stepper motors are one of the unsung heroes of the age. Hard drives, CNC Mills, 3D Printers and more just wouldn't exist without them. They can do so much more than a regular DC motor, but that capability comes with a little complexity. This video hopes to de-mystify that and show you how easy it is to get started.

The 28BYJ-48 motor used in this video are inexpensive and readily available. You should be able to find them online for under $10.00 US and they will offer a fantastic way to get into the world of stepper motors. Grab one and follow along!

This video focuses on how to actually drive the motor with an Arduino. To gain a better understanding of the internals of the 28BYJ-48 motors, and how the ULN2003 board is used to drive them, check out Bret's "28BYJ-48 Stepper Motor and ULN2003 Driver Intro" video (https://aka.ms/28BYJ).

Lastly, you can grab all the code, and the slides from this episode from Bret's 28BYJ-48 GitHub Repo: https://aka.ms/28byjrepo

No, go turn some motors!

In this Episode:

[01:44] Hooking it all up

[05:20] Wave driving

[07:15] Getting the code from GitHub

[08:10] Wave driving demo

[15:28] Reversing direction demo

[16:40] Moving a specific distance

[18:24] Refactoring the code to use arrays

[20:05] Full Stepping and Half Stepping

[25:11] Stepper libraries

[26:30] AccelStepper demo

FoIIow @bretstateham

FoIIow @themakershow