Micro stepper motor

Ossipee was nice enough to send me a big box-O-goodies and he included some very tiny stepper motors. From what we can gather, these can be found in blue-ray players, cameras, NSA drones, etc. and can be found on ebay pretty cheap.

Neat little motors that I got running on Arduino by simply using one of the "stepper" examples in the IDE. The pinout is weird and the connections are really short and fiddly so I rigged this up.Pretty globby but it does plug into a breadboard.

I think I may have damaged one soldering wires to it so keep that in mind and stay cool :D Also probably not the best idea to run these directly from your pins but the smoke remained in my Arduino even with some fiddling. But if you value your duino it may not be best...

The motors Ossipee sent me have little gears on the shaft so this may be worth revisiting for some interesting hacking:

https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/9231?page=1

The motors I got had the coils paired with the 2 leads nearest the shaft as one coil and the 2 near the back were another pair.

These are really neat so it may be worth it for someone to design a breakout board if it can be determined that most of the variants share the same pin spacing.

Made a weird little board that holds 3 of them:

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVVfUX2TEm4

They are bipolar stepper

They are bipolar stepper motors. Can rip them from old bluray transport mechanisms. They are used as tiny linear actuators moving a lens back and forth to change the focal point for dual layer discs. I have heaps but haven’t thought of a use for them yet. I really like the break out board you made.

That’s an awesome little

That’s an awesome little board to connect that small motor with the rest of the world :slight_smile:

I’ve seen that kind of steppers in taobao but wasn’t sure if I should get some…seems I should :smiley: With a board like yours it would be much more easy to work with them.

The PCB I made is kind of a

The PCB I made is kind of a hybrid SMT board with the motor soldered to the copper side. I just tinned the board and motor leads and fidgeted it into place. Holes were drilled to help line up the leads on the motors but it wasn’t quite right on this board.

Maybe it would be worth it to have some regular production boards produced for these little motors? They are damned neat \o/