Arduino Stepper Motor Drive Coil Winder

by Lewis Loflin

Videos for this project:

Arduino stepper motor coil winder
Arduino Stepper Motor Tutorial
PNP Darlington Stepper Motor Driver

As an amateur radio builder winding RF coils is a tedious and often hit and miss process. Based on a combination of earlier and some new programming an Arduino micro-controller based board in combination with a 5-volt unipolar stepper motor solved the problem.

Most of the coils use a 2 inch diameter mailing tube held in place with nuts in a threaded rod. The end pieces were cut with keyhole bits on a drill press. The threaded rod was connected directly to the stepper motor shaft with vinyl tubbing. See video for construction details.

Arduino controller board with real time clock DS1307.

Above controller board with an I2C LCD display. The four switches are connected to DP2-DP5 allows the user to program the number of turns by holding down SW1 while adding 1 by pressing SW2 or adding 10 by pressing SW3. SW4 is the run switch - the count is decremented by 1 every 360 degree (or 200 steps with a 1.8 degree stepper) until the count is zero. Pressing reset clears the count back to 0.

The control board can use any Arduino controller and here includes a DS1307 real time clock. The outputs to the stepper motor driver uses 4 opto-couplers. The motor and Arduino in this case have separate power supplies.

Also note the control in the upper left-hand corner can act as a speed control.

This is the schematic of above board without the DS1307 clock. See MOSFET Driver Board

An alternative PNP Darlington Driver Board.

Connections I2C LCD Display to Arduino

To connect the I2C LCD display see Connect Arduino to I2C Liquid Crystal Display

Arduino code for this project: winder.txt.

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