Stepper Motor Driver

he simplest way of interfacing a unipolar stepper to Arduino is to use a breakout for ULN2003A transistor array chip. The ULN2003A contains seven darlington transistor drivers and is somewhat like having seven TIP120 transistors all in one package. The ULN2003A can pass up to 500 mA per channel and has an internal voltage drop of about 1V when on. It also contains internal clamp diodes to dissipate voltage spikes when driving inductive loads.To control the stepper, apply voltage to each of the coils in a specific sequence.

***This driver can also be used to drive: 

1. Relay
2. DC Motor
3. Buzzer
4. LEDs
5. Solenoid Electric Door Lock

The sequence of pulse for driving a unipolar-stepper-motor would go like this:

Here are schematics showing how to interface a unipolar stepper motor to four controller pins using a ULN2003A, and showing how to interface using four TIP120’s.

Features : 

1. The rotation angle of the motor is proportional to the input pulse.
2. The motor has full torque at standstill(if the windings are energized)
3. Precise positioning and repeatability of movement since good stepper motors have an accuracy of – 5% of a step and this error is non cumulative from one step to the next.
4. Excellent response to starting/stopping/reversing.
5. Very reliable since there are no contact brushes in the motor. Therefore the life of the motor is simply dependant on the life of the bearing.
6. The motors response to digital input pulses provides open-loop control, making the motor simpler and less costly to control.
7. It is possible to achieve very low speed synchronous rotation with a load that is directly coupled to the shaft.
8. A wide range of rotational speeds can be realized as the speed is proportional to the frequency of the input pulses.

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