I am new to stepper motors. I own a car audio electronics shop. I am building a custom motorized draw for a customer. This will open and close to hide his radar detector. I purchased a stepper motor with the rated current of 1.5 A and voltage 3.3 V DC. I thought I could just put power to this motor and it would work.come to find out that’s not how stepper motors work. Is there a part that you sell that would be fairly easy to run on 12 V to control this motor
Hi, you’re right that is not how stepper motors work.
Stepper motors move in precise steps of an exact angle, so to get a stepper motor to move at given speed you need to drive the coils of the motor in a particular order at a particular frequency. This is not a straightforward thing to do, luckily there are lots of ready made stepper motor controller boards out there. These are generally controlled by specifying a direction and a clock pulse on their logic inputs, the frequency of this clock pulse will set the speed of the motor. This allows you to move the motor to a precise position and hold it there, so they are used for CNC machine tools and robotics.
Having said all this, a stepper motor probably isn’t the best option for the job you’re trying to do. You’ll have a much easier time buying a 12 volt DC motor with a gearbox and using two limit switches to detect when the drawer is fully open or fully closed. This way you could control the whole system with a few switches without needing any stepper controller boards or micro controllers!
Hope this helps.