How to start a stepper motor with a push button, but stop it on its own

[StefanL38]

Hello @wow39 ,

welcome to the Arduino-Forum.

you should read this and take it into your heart.

Make experienced users help: two ways to quickly post code as a code-section

Hi newcomer, This thread wants to show you how you can speed-up getting helpful answers with small effort. If you manage at least to post this way. You have the sympathy of the experienced users. If you are willing to invest another 20 minutes these 20 minutes extra-time will save you a minimum of 200 minutes to finish your project. always post your full sketch. As a code-section from the very first to the very last line A code-section has a small height => keeps your posting "short" but…

@wow39

Hello,
I'm trying to code a push button to turn on a stepper motor and then the motor turns off after 20 seconds.

How can I do this?

to be as shortworded like you

you use a library for stepper-motors that offers background step-pulse-creation.
This hsort answer does not help very much - I know.

A stepper-motor driven by the stepper.h-library needs a step-pulse for each step the stepper-motor shall do. Otherwise you would have no control over the stepper-motor.

This means you have to let void loop looping for 20 seconds.
This requires non-blocking timing which is described here.

Example-code for timing based on millis() easier to understand through the use of example-numbers / avoiding delay()

non-blocking timing. Execute code only from time to time. There are a lot of different ways to learn programming. This thread wants to add another approach that is different to the yet existing ones. UPDATE 06.01.2023 if you are mainly interested in applying non-blocking timing you can do a quick read of this short tutorial / demonstration If you are intersted in understanding the details how it works go on reading here. I use an everyday analogon in this post to explain the basic princip…

best regards Stefan