Motors!

 I won a nice set of stepper motors, previously used in a Maker-bot on eBay! These are NEMA-17, with a holding torque of 1.7 n-m.  Its small, but hopefully they will be strong enough to push the chassis.  They are a pain to control, right now i'm plugging them directly to an Arduino, which doesn't seem to have too much power.... i think the next step will be to build a controller for them.




Here is one of the motors mounted directly onto the bearing housings. One of the most annoying thing about these motors is the little black gear grafted on the shaft: i tried everything, heating it, pulling it, hitting it, but it wouldn't budge.  I ended up breaking the edge off with a hammer, and then using an improvised gear pull to extract them.... The amount of force used bent a piece of 4mm steel like a ribbon.  These motors are a pain!!