Ahhh, so much progress has been made on my senior design project since the last time I posted.
We also got the machine to sort marker bands fairly consistently, but we still need to work on the feeding out marker bands one at a time (which I’ll talk about in another post).
TL;DR = Delrin disk wasn’t moving with the NEMA 17 stepper motor, because the motor wasn’t strong enough. So we decided to use a NEMA 23 stepper motor and a TB6600 Stepper Motor Driver. Delrin disk can now move properly.
What I Did
I followed this tutorial to hook up the NEMA 23 Stepper Motor and the TB6600 Stepper Motor Driver: https://www.makerguides.com/tb6600-stepper-motor-driver-arduino-tutorial/
FYI we could no longer use the A4988 stepper motor driver board because it can’t handle the NEMA 23 Stepper Motor, unfortunately. But on the bright side, I was still able to use the code and knowledge from that experience! 😊
Code
Nothing fancy, it’s pretty much the same code as what I did with the NEMA 17 Stepper Motor (with inspiration from “makerguides”). Long story short, this code causes the stepper motor to spin continuously.
// Define stepper motor connections and steps per revolution: // Make sure external power supply as at least 14 V #define dirPin 2 #define stepPin 3 #define stepsPerRevolution 1600 void setup() { // Declare pins as output: pinMode(stepPin, OUTPUT); pinMode(dirPin, OUTPUT); } void loop() { // Set the spinning direction clockwise: digitalWrite(dirPin, HIGH); // Spin the stepper motor 1 revolution slowly: for (int i = 0; i < stepsPerRevolution; i++) { // These four lines result in 1 step: digitalWrite(stepPin, HIGH); delayMicroseconds(2000); digitalWrite(stepPin, LOW); delayMicroseconds(2000); } //delay(1000); //uncomment this if you need a delay