I just ordered my 1st Arduino board off of eBay and am waiting for it to arrive
in the meantime i am looking into what i can use it for i like the servo controller ideas and many others i have seen on this site and other Arduino sites
cant wait to try things out… gonna be prepping my breadboard, making jumper wires, and borrowing my servos from my RC plane
is there a way of driving a stepper motor directly from the Arduino? as i cannot get hold of any extra components at this time
in theory you can drive a stepper motor directly from four Arduino pins, but since each pin can only source 40mA at 5V it would probably be impossible to find a steppermotor that you can actually drive directly.
So put lots of components on your Xmas list
Stuff you would want to have around:
an assortment of resistors in common values
an assortment of capacitors in common values
some small signal diodes
some power diodes (for motor stuff)
some LED’s
a handfull of potentiometers in different values
different switches an push buttons
Hookupwire in various colors
a breadboard with jumper wires is good as well
and depending on what you want to do with the Arduino board different IC’s for multiplexing in/out puts, driving manyLED’s, driving stepper or DC motors or whatever
Sounds clever. I am working on a homebuilt analog modular synth http://mikmo.dk/synthstate.html so i have already gone way beyond gung-ho when we are talking about stocking components ;D
I just salvaged a MC14049UBPC chip, along with a few other bits, from an old Velleman metronome kit (from Maplin UK), and looking for the data sheets online i found it can be used for driving stepper motors
So i should be able to use it in tandem with my Arduino
gonna experiment with the schematics i have to make sure it runs ok tho.