The Stepper-motor: What It Is, What It Does And How You Can Use It

A stepper-motor is basically a cog set inside a series of electromagnets

. The electromagnets are fired one after the other, which makes the cog progress through a series of stages or steps. Each step is commonly used in an electronics project to denote a precise position of either an instrument or a piece of an instrument, for example a laser nozzle or a lens.

The more electromagnets and cog teeth you have, the more delicate the mechanism can be and so the more gradations or steps you can achieve. This is particularly important when you consider the finer requirements of something like the lens and laser of a CD player which needs to be precisely positioned to read the indentations trapped beneath the discs plastic surface.

The stepper-motor wheel travels round in a sequence dictated by the order of the firing electromagnets. To control the positioning of a device or component, you simply program your electromagnets to fire in specific orders for any given command. Routinely repeated steps, for example where a lens is required to scan three spate areas of a passport, can be programmed to activate from a single command.

The motor has limitations of size, in that the more complex the steps the larger the cog wheel has to be (to get more teeth on it, which represent more steps). It is sometimes necessary to abandon the use of a stepper-motor for positioning where requirements are too many or too delicate. In these cases servos are normally used instead.

The stepper-motor system is normally present in three phases in your installation:

Phase one is the indexer, or controller. Simply speaking, the stepper-motor indexer is the device that gives the commands out. Its key function in direct terms of getting the cog wheel to move are that it provides the step pulses and directional information necessary to make the wheel click round in the right manner.

The next phase of the system is the driver, which may also be known as the amplifier. This is because it is there to translate the indexers commands into the power required to run the stepper-motor. The type of driver you use is crucial to the overall ability of your system to control motion precisely. Not every amplifier is suitable for use in every application, so check your chosen modules thoroughly before you complete the design phase of your system.

Finally, the stepper-motor itself, which takes the power conversion delivered through the amplifier, and converts it into a series of steps as pre-programmed into the indexer or control device.

For all simple direction finding and control tasks, the stepper-motor is a good bet. Bear in mind though that it exhibits resonance at low speeds and at very high speeds loses torque. If either of these potential effects presents a problem it may be necessary to reconsider the design and configure accordingly.

The motor may have its pole number (the number of steps it clicks through) amplified cheaply by adding multiple teeth to single cog teeth.

by: Ewan Fisher

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