Hi again,

Finally got around to ordering some better motors. Arrived this morning: 3 NEMA 23 type Steppers. 1.8deg per step 0.4A but more important is the power – 34N/cm. thats about 200 times stronger than the last lot and they feel it, very hard to stop.

So wired them with connectors and plugged into the Driver pcb. Tweaked the software and uploaded it. Made up some quick brackets to hold the motors to the mounts. Ran the tests. Absolutely perfect!

Movement is quite quick and accurate. Driver runs at 200 steps per second with a 1.8 deg motor and 50:1 gearing I get 10,000 steps to 360 degrees or 0.036 deg accuracy. Full 360 deg turn in 50 seconds.

Youtube video for visual show:

Cold, rainy and cloudy outside so no practical testing, still happy with the result though.

All I need to do now is tidy it up and weatherproof it a bit more.

Future changes will be to remake the whole mount out of metal (aluminium) instead of wood. Wood made it easy to chop and change but now it’s pretty set metal will give it more solid movement and better life (and look better 😉 )

Also intend on adding a Bluetooth module to remove the controller wire and to improve the MCU board. I have an NXP Arm proto board here I’d like to use. Gives me the ability to make it more responsive and featured.

Thats all for today.

Radan.