Stepper motor control

Beginner aiming to learn motor control with the MC. I have this stepper motor (see link). Will it work well with the Make Controller? http://www.robotshop.ca/home/products/robot-parts/motors/stepper-motors/103H546-0440-stepper-motor.html

That looks like it will be fine. Although you'll need to get a separate power supply to drive it at 3.3V, it looks like.

krankajen, Here's how you could have determined what Liam just told you: Take a look at the PDF specification sheet for your stepper: http://www.robotshop.ca/PDF/rbact05-specs.pdf This sheet specifies that the current per phase is 1Amp. Now look at the digital outputs specification on the Make Controller Application board overview: http://www.makingthings.com/resources/tutorials/application-board-overview/index_html/digital-outputs Here, you see that the digital outputs are rated at 1Amp per channel. So this is good. The Make Controller can deliver the amperage that your stepper requires. The next issue is voltage. The specification sheet for your stepper specifies 3.15Volts. Now you might be thinking great, the board is powered with at ~3Volts over the USB connection. True, but the USB is not going to provide the amperage required. Instead, you need to provide the 3.15Volts from an external power supply and connect it to the Vext connector that belongs to the bank of digital outputs you use for the stepper. The big downside of this is that you can't run the Make Controller off the same 3.15Volt external power supply you need for the stepper. That's not a big deal if you plan on keeping your project connected to the USB or don't mind using another 6-12V power supply to power the controller through the V+ terminal. However, there is a way to get your stepper to run on 6.3Volts, in which case you could use the same power supply for the stepper and the Make Controller. This gets a little complicated, but you wanted to learn about steppers, right? Ok, you'll notice that your stepper has six wires. This means you have a unipolar stepper. However, you can easily operate your stepper as a bipolar by cutting off (or just not using) the centertap wires (white and black on your motor). When you do this, you double the coil resistance, which means you can use twice the voltage and still keep current at 1Amp. In this way, you can use a 6Volt power supply for both stepper motor and controller power. For all the details on Unipolar and Bipolar and why it all works,check out: http://www.stepperworld.com/pgTutorials.htm

Thanks a lot for taking the time to help me out. And that link is just what I need.