Terry- Yep, it's those AirConditioner steppers. Love them, so much torque it's crazy. I've not ordered from your store, but have browsed a number of times and seen you carry them along with the ULN2003A darlington driver boards for a couple of bucks. Great item, everyone should have a handful of them. I have also mounted wheels on two and a caster for a third wheel and made a bot with them, and if you remember my Frankenbotic Thinganator (the wall plotter made of salvaged stepper motors and fishing line) I went back and replaced the original steppers with those little beasts, but I haven't redone the code yet. Suffice to say, the resolution on the Thinganator is going through the roof... the video below is the original Thinganator, somewhere around here I have a couple of photos of it writing "Arduino Rocks" in a couple of fonts. Taking out radial distortion was very hard and done with recursive approximation.. the new version will implement some newer, faster code which is based on Heron's extrapolation of Pythagorean theory, calculation of the height of a triangle (y coordinate) by the length of the sides/tensors (my fishing lines form two sides and the beam is the third) and then calculating the x coordinate from the y. It actually made sense once I started thinking of it as a tensor/triangle problem-- the inverted triangle, no matter the angles, is composed of two right triangles of equal height, gravity being the third tensor. MUCH more accurate and fast than recursive approximation. I've also been thinking about a tweak to Bresenham's line algorithm (which I already redid for this as unidirectional while Bresenham's is arbitrary) that ought to make location calculation a bit easier too, but that's for another time...
As for coupling on the XY table, that's a 1" coupling nut, filled in with epoxy and jammed onto the motor halfmoon shaft, then caked in more (stick this time, not liquid) epoxy and secured with drywall screws. If my projects don't give actual engineers the heebie jeebies, then they obviously haven't looked too closely.
I'll MacGuyver anything, badly. If I thought it were even remotely possible, I'd probably somehow make my own transistors out of sand with a bic lighter, just to be a moron about it In reality, I have more than once thought about throwing you guys here on the site a curveball and make something robotic but instead of transistors, how about vaccum tube-- or better yet, home-made triodes. Those can be made fairly easily.... just need a torch, some nitrogen, and some funky bits of wire, as far as I can tell...
