Hooking up steppers to test them

[Bob Cole]

I have {4} Applied Motion steppers. Part # 5034-350. 8 wires. 2.47V 5.9Amp.
I know NOTHING about how to test these to see if they will move the shaft. The wires are color coded Black - Red - Orange -Yellow - White/Orange stripe - White/Red stripe - White/Yellow stripe - White/black stripe.

My question is can I hook up a 12V DC power supply to test these motors for rotation? And if I can, in what sequence should the wires be hooked up? Such as black & White/black together? and so on. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I do not have any Gecko drivers yet, just the motors and a 12V DC power source.


Thanks,
Bob C.

[ViperTX]

No....they are steppers and require that the coils be energized in a particular sequence. While you're waiting for a Gecko, Xylotex, etc.....get yourself a 40 or 50 VDC supply.

[Willbird]

This brings up a question I have been thinking on. What would it take to run a stepper in a chosen direction at a speed chosen by a trim pot ??. I some folks talking about fpga motion control, and have been reading on that. It seems to me that a stepper, a Gecko, a trim pot, and some mounting brackets, limit switches, etc. would make an X axis power feed. many of the parts used could later be used for a full on cnc conversion. Couple that with a DOS or LINUX based DRO program to use an encoder on the motor and it could have some real utility. I know you can buy harbor freight power feeds for $150 i saw in another post, but this would be better than that I would think. The only slight PITA in the deal would be that when you moved it by hand it would be disconnected like a power feed is...but when you have a power feed you really don't move things by hand that much, or very far :-)

Bill

[ViperTX]

Yes....you could debounce the step and direction pins to the gecko....the thing is....without computer control.....you are only going to succeed in going CW or CCW for some time....

Look at the Gecko input pins for hints.

[dtman2]

A 'trimpot' alone wouldn't be enough. You need to produce digital pulses at a particular rate and input them to the Gecko to advance the axis. You could design a circuit to do this of course (the circuit might be one IC and a few other components plus power supply etc), but getting a computer to do it is probably easier in some ways - but then you essentially have a cnc machine. I did see somewhere a 3 axis controller that had a joystick input so it could work stand alone without a computer.

[Willbird]

Well My point was that a servo power feed is a pricey item :-). And a setup like I desribed would work nice as a power feed. I sort of understand what the Gecko or other driver needs to do it's job, what I was asking is how one would generate the pulses, and how one would vary their timing to control speed :-).

Bill