Arduino project guidance - many questions

Projects General Guidance
1

Hey, I am new to Arduino and planning a project and I have a few questions
So my project consists of controlling the speeds of a stepper motor with an external Synth CV sequencer that is connected with a jack socket to the arduino system.
There would be a potentiometer next to it to adjust the base speed of the motor.
There would also be a switch button to reverse the direction of the motor.

I already have an Arduino Uno, a Polulu Dual MAX14870 Motor Driver Shield, a breadboard, a toggleswitch ...

Which potentiometer should be used to be able to go from very slow (and precise) to quite fast speeds?
And what stepper motor would be the best? (prefferably a smaller or flat one)
Do I need more/other components ?
And finally I'd be glad to get some tips about what codes to write to make all this work ?

Thanks for the support and have a good day

2

A potentiometer will not be super precise and you depend on the precision of the ADC. ➜ I would use a quadrature encoder to have a fine grain resolution.

the best for moving what? you need to think in terms of torque, max speed, ...

3

Hey thanks for the reply
So what I would need to move would be magnetic tape, so not too heavy things to move.
I think it just has to be precise when it's slow and that it moves to different speed quite rapidly.
I dont really know about the max speed but doesnt has to be too fast but a typical stepper motor fast i guess i would say.

4

these are not technical specifications..

not too heavy things
has to be precise when it's slow
moves to different speed quite rapidly
has to be too fast
...

I'd say get any stepper to get started with.

5

first of all you should use a hardware stepperdriver like a TMC2209 to control your stepper motor. That makes it very easy to control everything you need. There are two or three digital inputs on the driver to choose microstepping mode (1/2, 1/4, 1/8 stepmode or even more) These ones you use to adjust precision basespeed and in some way the torque of the motor. Then you have an enable pin on which you switch the motor on and off , a direction pin to swap between directions and last but not least the step input on which you get pulses (HIGH-LOW sequences) created by your Arduino. In order to adjust the frequence of the pulses you program waiting time between the HIGH/LOW change and this directly defines the speed of the motor. here a little basic example sequence just to run a motor continuesly until the while statement changes:

      digitalWrite(Dbl, LOW);   
      while(!digitalRead(Sync)) 
      {
       digitalWrite(Mot, HIGH);
       delayMicroseconds(Mspeed);
       digitalWrite(Mot, LOW);
       delayMicroseconds(Mspeed);
      }               
     digitalWrite(Dbl, HIGH);

to explain my variables: "Dbl" is the enable signal (I call it disable because on HIGH the motor is off). With the digital "Mot" Pin you create the pulse on the the Arduino output. A digital input on the Arduino called "Sync" interrupts the pulse sequence to the motor. "Mspeed" is a value for the waitingtime. This one you can make variable with a poti to control the motor speed. Just try to play around a little bit with your motor and have fun

6

Yes okay I will see about all that thanks a lot :slight_smile: