Hi everyone. I am new new the world of robotics. For a project at my university I need to move a stepper motor linear actuator with feedback (encoder) by means of a fancy 1500$ datalogger (basically a fancy arduino with storage). I am looking for a very cheap very cheap linear actuator with feedback and with stepper motor to be used for some testing. I am not interested in speed (it can be very low) and it has to carry not more than 5-7 pounds of load. It is mostly needed for testing since then eventually everything is gonna be underwater. If everything works on a table in the lab, then I will buy a very expensive (6k) underwater actuator for my undersea application. But again, I need a very cheap one to use NOT underwater in the lab. I will buy this Ingenia Motion drive https://store.grp6.com/hyd-8-48-c-hydra-digital-closed-loop-stepper-motor-drive-usb-rs485-canopen/ since it will be compatible with my fancy 6k underwater stepper motor actuator. The guy from Ingenia motion told me that any cheap stepper motor actuator would work for testing as long as it has
2 phase stepper motor
4 or 8 leads (wires)
Those numbers mean nothing for me, I am looking on amazon and on google and I find very cheap (10-20 bucks) stepper motor, but I cannot find a cheap system stepper motor + linear actuator+encoder. Am I missing something? As for the stroke, anything is fine, as for precision, I would like to have steps of 1 mm but also 1 cm will be fine if it keeps the price low.
Thank you
Best
Alberto