Hi
I am building a prototype that is using five 28byj-48 stepper motors and an Arduino mega.
I would like to have an easy to use power supply that can be easily connected to the drivers using jumper wires without soldering.
These should work between your solderless breadboard and the wires of your stepper motors.
I assume you are using a ULN2003 Driver Board for each stepper. You will need a bunch of prototyping wires to connect the power pin to the power rails on a solderless breadboard. The
Power supplies with screw terminals are super-common and you can get them with multiple voltage outputs so you can have 5V for the Arduino plus 12V for motors, etc.
...They usually have the (exposed) AC terminals next to the low-voltage terminals so they are really intended to be installed inside another enclosure for safety (so nobody touches the AC) but sometimes I just cover the AC terminals with hot glue. I've seen plastic covers that cover the entire terminal strip but I'm not sure where to get them.
How much can you spend?
An ideal laboratory supply for prototyping should have variable current limit as well as variable voltage output.
Have you done a power audit on your system, that is roughly calculated the current needed to drive your project when driving the steppers?
Most lab supplies have terminals that can clamp DuPont style leads, or you make a pair of leads to go from the supply terminals terminals with DuPont pins on the Arduino ends.
Tom...
![]()
PS. Any reason for not soldering?
I am doing this project inside my house and do not have suitable place for soldering.
What I would like to do is to have a quick way to connect the stepper motors.
My budget is from 50 to 100$
P.S.
If electronics is going to be your hobby you should get a soldering iron (and solder and extra flux and a few other tools to for a basic "soldering kit"). You should also have a multimeter, and a cheap meter is better than no meter.
That said... I've sometimes uses this kind of terminal strip to connect wires and/or a few components without soldering. You can use them for resistors, capacitors, diodes, and sometimes transistors, etc. (They are plastic and they can easily be cut with a hacksaw if you want fewer terminals/connections.)
For connecting wires together you can use wire nuts or crimp splices. (You'll need a crimping tool for the crimp splices). You can also connect components with leads (resistors, etc.) this way but you usually need shrink tubing or (or some kind of insulating tubing) for the leads and with a lot of components it gets "messy".
I've also built a few permanent projects on a plug-in breadboard (although there is usually some soldering off of the breadboard). That CAN be long-term reliable. I built a car alarm that way and it worked for almost 20 years! And a couple of other pre-Arduino projects that I don't remember when I made but they are probably 20 years old (or more) and they are still working.
Soldering is not welding.
I've always done it inside the house or apartment (also at work). The smoke is very-minimal and it shouldn't trigger your smoke alarm.
If you are "paranoid" or if you have small children you should probably use lead-free solder. The smoke is mostly from flux, not the lead, so it's not that dangerous unless your kids eat the solder. And it doesn't hurt to have a fan or something so you don't directly breath the smoke.
It's good to have a wood surface like a cutting board, or an actual cutting board that you care about accidently burning when you drop solder on it, or if you touch the soldering iron to it. Formica and tile are pretty heat-resistant too, but if you care about the appearance surface you shouldn't solder on it.
Or you're supposed to have an anti-static mat, and that will protect whatever surface you're working on. ...I'm pretty "casual" about that and at home I just try to remember to touch ground to discharge myself before touching the electronics. But, I did have an Arduino die "for no reason" once, and that could have been static discharge.
At work we have strict rules so I have a grounded static-safe workstation, we have wrist straps or shoe straps or special anti-static shoes (which I have) and the floor is conductive and grounded.
These are what I use for semi-permanent connections.
Clearly labelled +12 0 0 +5
Mine have been in use daily on my workbench for TWENTY years !
Probably a bad suggestion for this project using digital logic where what is required is strictly 5 Volts. ![]()
For driving five 28byj-48 (presumably 5 V version but even better for the 12 V version) stepper motors, I would recommend discarding the ULN2003 Driver Boards and using three TPIC6B595s which should be available in modules.
Five of these steppers amounts to 1 Amp, so a 5 V 2 Amp supply would be well adequate. If you get one with a coaxial plug, you can use screw adapters:

Absolutely!
Sadly, translators from Chinese and various European languages which lack the technical nuances, are generally not technically literate and translate the process of soldering in those languages to English as "welding". Google Translate suffers from this problem as it is not (adequately) context-sensitive.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
