Stepper motors or DC motors

Are stepper motors better for driving a small four wheel drive robot than DC motors.

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yes

in what wa, I had problems with stepper motors for the robot, so I am just wondering

Hi,

How small, how fast, what is the power supply?

Geared DC motors are usually better than steppers when it comes to traction drive of a robot.

Thanks.. Tom... :smiley: :+1: :coffee: :australia:

The stepper motors are small and not fast, they are beginner motors I got from Amazon. The power supply is 9 volt battery

You will eventually have to switch to AA (4x or 6x) or 18650 (2x) batteries. A regular 9V battery will not be enough

ok, thank you

If you're going to use DC motors, you will probably need to find some that have encoders or navigation will be rather hit and miss at best.

The inefficiency of steppers make them less than ideal for battery powered projects. They draw the same current whether they are running or not. Some drivers have a way to disable the output drivers which will help. I would prefer a geared DC motor with an encoder. The encoder would be on the motor output shaft, before the gearbox, giving maximum resolution.

9V smoke alarm batteries are a poor choice for most motor power supplies.

ok thanks

Steppers are a very poor choice for traction.

They are vastly inefficient compared to a simple DC motor, very noisy and slow and get very hot.

A simple DC gear motor with built-in encoder is the way to go for battery powered robot traction.

However I see the appeal of stepper motors for simple dead-reckoning drive, but the costant power consumption will soon become annoying.

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