Moving a stepper motor with a computer

Projects General Guidance
1

Greetings. I am completely new to Arduino and programming in general. For my project I'd like to advance a stepper motor 5 steps and then stop. I'd like the computer to a display a basic window with a button that could be pressed, or maybe a simple key press from the keyboard, that would then turn the motor. I've looked at the code on the main site for the motor knob and it looks pretty simple. I just have no clue how to do the user interface. I also plan to remove the Arduino board from the equation and just use the microcontroller. Would a 16 MHz external resonator be necessary for such an application or would the internal clock work fine?

Here are the links to my stepper motor and motor driver:

2

You need to decide how to connect the Arduino to the PC. Using a USB connection would be the simplest way, and in that case you need to include the USB driver hardware in your Arduino circuit - an Arduino or clone is by far the easiest way to achieve that.

Once you have the basic architecture sorted out you need to decide what you're going to use as the client application on the PC. If you go with the USB connection then Processing would be one easy option, but you could use any technology capable of writing to a serial port.

If you decide to use a different type of connection, then of course you'd be free to use whatever type of client you like which supports that type of connection. For example, if you adopt an Ethernet or WiFi interface then you could put a web server on the Arduino and use a browser as your client. However, the USB approach would be the easiest one.

3

I want to use a USB connection, but how would I go about doing that with just the ATMEGA328P microcontroller?

I've been looking into Processing and I see the Arduino website has tutorials for communication. I'm not quite sure how to make a button yet just from looking at this tutorial.
http://processing.org/learning/topics/button.html

4

halfro:
I want to use a USB connection, but how would I go about doing that with just the ATMEGA328P microcontroller?

You'd need to include a USB interface and associated driver electronics and firmware. People often use an FTDI chip for that and you can probably find the schematics. Since you're planning to build your own board I assume you're comfortable designing and building electronic circuits.