extruder stepper motor CNC Stepper Motor High Torque NEMA 17 Motors

 extruder stepper motor CNC Stepper Motor High Torque NEMA 17 Motors 

1.What You Need

To run these stepper motors you will need a motor controller and a power supply.

（1）Motor Controller

A motor controller allows you to use low-voltage signals from your computer to send higher-voltage pulses to the motor.It has a 25 watt maximum power rating and can run one bipolar stepper motor or two brushed DC motors.

(2) Power Supply

Stepper motors used in printers tend to run on 24v but they will generally operate at lower voltage, albeit with less torque and rotation speed. Most of the units I have tried will spin up with 12v - 14v at around 400ma.

Current is an important consideration, especially if you choose to power the motors at 24v. Most cheap motor controllers are around 20 to 25 watts. Twenty-four volts at 1000ma is 24 watts meaning you will need to keep the current below that to avoid drawing more power than your motor controller can handle.

(3) Determining Pinouts

One of the tricky aspects of stepper motors is finding which wires are which and where they go. Bipolar steppers have two pairs of wires, but they may not be adjacent to each other.

Alternately, if your stepper motor has a flat gray cable with a blue stripe on one edge (pictured below), I have you covered there, too. The first pair consists of the wire on the blue edge, then the third wire in the cable. The second pair is the second and fourth wires in the cable.

Unfortunately most other printer motors have no colour coding so you will need to do some detective work.

The first thing I do before I tear down a printer is download a full service manual. This can be difficult in itself because of all the crappy sites that pop up in search results offering free manuals only to send you around in circles before asking for money. You will need to persist, and you may find you'll download a few manuals before you get the right one. You need the actual service manual, not the user manual.

Once you have the service manual you can study the diagrams to determine the pinouts by the circuit boards the motor plugs into.

If all this fails, you will need a multimeter. Many people identify these pairs by looking for resistance between the wires, but I use a different technique.

Stepper motors actually produce real voltage when you turn them by hand. Set your multimeter to volts and connect it to two of the wires then turn the motor. If you see the voltage jump, you have found a pair. If not, disconnect one wire and try another. Once you have found both pairs you are half way there.