I'm trying to make a box divided in half that has doors that open to each half. It will have a button that when pressed will open one door 180° and 30 seconds later will close it. The next time the button is pressed it will open the other door 180° and then close it 30 seconds later. The doors would be pretty light made out of 8" x 9" x 1/2" pine. The stepper motors would never be active simultaneously.
I was thinking an Arduino set up with 2 28BYJ-48 stepper motors, 1 uln2003 motor controller board, an Arduino Nano Every, and a button to trigger the stepper motor to open and close alternating doors.
The device will open one or the other door roughly every 10 to 15 minutes for 5 hours a week, so about 20 to 30 times in a week.
I will use some online tutorials to help write the code.
Basically, I need ideas on how to power the arduino and the stepper motors with batteries as this project needs to be portable.
Never having worked with Arduino boards, I would just like. for once, to avoid buying the wrong components for this project.
Are the stepper motors going to HOLD the doors closed, or just close and power off? Then anyone could open the doors.
This is not a project that you can build once and be done with. It will require quite a bit of learning and experimentation.
For the batteries to last, the motors cannot be powered all the time, and you would need to use sleep modes for the Arduino. The standard Arduino boards like the Uno aren't useful for this, because of all the other power hungry components on the board. The Pro Mini is good for power down sleep mode, in which case it consumes negligible power.
The 28BYJ motors are heavily geared down with plastic gears, so they would hold position when not powered. But the gears would easily be destroyed if someone were to attempt to open the door.
A problem with steppers is that they do not know "where they are", and you can destroy the plastic gears if you try to force the door closed when it is already closed. People use limit switches to detect open and closed states, or to detect "zero" for the shaft position.
To start this project, buy an Arduino, a 28BYJ stepper with driver, and learn how to use them. This is a bargain and a good learning experience, even if you decide that the 28BYJ stepper is not useful for the final build.
28BJY construction info: 28BYJ-48
Good question. I assumed the motor would hold the door closed but now that mention it, it probably won't. Basically the idea is that I want people to take items from one side then the other. It's not a security issue so much as an indicator for people to know which side to take things from.
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