6pin printer steppers and Darlington NPNx4 arrays

Hi everyone,

I'm in the planning stages for my second Arduino project and would love some advice.

I've pulled some 6 wire steppers of unknown specs out of an old printer. Inside I also found six MP4303 darlington arrays that I hope to use to power my motor. I'm hoping to start with a 2-axis drawbot, but need some help with the electronics.

I plan on using an Arduino Uno the "brain" could anyone give me some tips on how to wire up the 12pin darlington to one motor? I read in a different thread that I may not produce enough current with one darlington, and could wire them in parallel. I would love to see a diagram on how to connect this. The printer also has a small powersupply and transformer inside, should I attempt to use these?

Much thanks for your help.

Instead of making us do the work for you, why don't you post a bit more info on the darlingtons.

As the help is for free, and most of us have other stuff we could/should/aught to be doing, and this is your project, make it easy for us to see what you are talking about and we will be much more willing and able to help.

There is a lot of knowledge/experience to be found here, do your part to do as much research as you can, and we will be glad to help you with more resources.

Get the datasheet for those darlingtons and then give us a little schematic of them a and go from there. You can find a lot of datasheets online just search for datasheet and the part number.

Hi there kf2qd,

I'm mighty confused on how to hook arduino -> darlington -> stepper.

Like I said I have some older 6-pin unipolar steppers and they want about 4 volts at 1.5 amps. I pulled the darlingtons off the same printer pcb, so I'm pretty sure they'll work together.

I'm unsure how to wire them up in parallel for sufficient amps. Do I tie together common emitters and collectors for one signal? And how do I set this up for a 6-pin stepper?

The darlington datasheet can be found here: HTTP 301 This page has been moved But it boils down to 4 NPN transistors in a 12 pin package, like this:

Some stats:

I'm aiming for a bot based on the polargraph instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Polargraph-Drawing-Machine/?ALLSTEPS but I would like to build my own driver board, instead of buying a prefabbed shield.

Pins 2, 4, 9 and 11 connect to your 4 coils on your motor. The 2 common wires on your motor connect to + voltage. 6 & 7 to Ground. (Tie this ground to the arduino ground)

the 4 outputs from your arduino connect to 1, 5, 8 & 12.

Figure our the proper sequencing of your leads from the motor. Use an ohm meter to figure out the 4 coils and the 2 commons. Coil to coil will have 2x the rsistance of coil to common.