motor bord from digital LN17-C2 printer

I have broke down a few printers and need info on the stepper motor Bord's can anyone help there`s 6 wires coming off them yellow, red ,volt ,gray ,blue & orange I'm thinking they would be strong enough to use on a small cnc tool if I Had the info on the wiring t was a 24volt and a 5 volt PS in the printer I think i may be able to raise the 24volt to 36 volt to make them a stronger if there's any printer tech`s out there that can help

Stepper motors can be alot of fun to play with.

The motors you have are 6 wire so that makes it quite easy. I would tend to make my own drivers using some N Channel MOSFETS.

You should see that you have two groups of 3 wires, connected together with from 5 to 200 ohms.

First of all, work out which groups of 3 wires are joined together. ie multimeter on ohms scale.

Each group of 3 wires is actually 2 coils, which are connected together at one point.

Find the two wires in each group with the MOST or highest resistance between them. These are the switching wires, and the third wire is the common.

Use a 9volt battery as a starting point. Connect the two commons together. (That is the one common from both sets of coils.)

Put the two commons onto the + terminal of the 9volt battery. Then you can one at a time, touch the switch wire to the -V terminal.

If you do this properly the motor should step. You must find the correct order of switching to rotate the motor. The steps should be even and consistant. If they are not even, then you probably have the wrong step sequence.

If you reverse the switching order, the motor will go the other way.

Once you have finally mastered this the last step is to use some MOSFETS to switch the four channels. That is another story again. (There are many kits around for this)

I did this several years ago with photocopier motors, and used a pen. I made a PC program and a printer point. It was a very crude plotter, but it did work to some extent.

Another interesting thing is that most CNC servo motors, sit still (hold) for longer than they move. Stepper motors do not like sitting still. (They are power hungry, and not efficient doing this.)

Hope this helps, but the main thing is to have fun

Paul

It's so damn nice to see a clear, direct explanation for starting such a project, rather than a treatise on torque, politics, and/or, er, wine. ;>)

One cannot get to the fun part without finding an entrance, so to speak. Thanks for reminding me that I was going to see if the contents of that part of my junkbox reserved for dead HD and printer motorboards could be applied to on-the-fly remote tap-switching the primary of a Tesla coil. A copy of your post has been saved to my harddrive.

Mark L. Fergerson

Hi,

If you want to do more experimenting and see how microstepping makes the motor move and perhaps try adjusting the motor current, it may be worth looking at this controller which is for sale on Ebay. Please have a look at the datasheet link from the ebay page for info;

Thanks,

Pete