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Showing posts from September, 2018

Pesky Digispark clones and stepper motors

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I'm building this cable car I found on Thingiverse. I actually started on this version , driven by a cheap stepper motor. Neither quite fits my needs: I want to mount it on the underside of a bunk bed. I settled on this idea of a usb stepper motor. I.e. a stepper motor powered and controlled via a USB connection. A Digispark ATTiny85 has 4 wires left over after USB. The stepper motor is a  28BYJ-48 . It's a unipolar stepper motor, and the driver board that came with it is enormous! I'm sure it's only economic because there's some enormous stockpile of ULN2003A chips somewhere that makes them basically free, or maybe a stockpile of actual boards. Anyway, This post explains quite well how to convert it to a bipolar stepper motor . Then I can use a DRV8835 driver carrier board, which will work at 5V and is really cheap (as low as $1.50). I've designed a mount/enclosure that looks like this: Unfortunately all I was getting the stepper motor to do was buz