The recent round of stepper talk had me thinking while watching drywall compound dry.
That led to this.
Straight forward demonstration of getting power out of a stepper.
This is a common style of 5 wire stepper motor.
Got a little out of hand. I used a ruler for straight lines, spray paint, even some creativity... I don't usually. Figured I might post it with hope someone will learn something if they see how easy it really is to do.
The 10mm, jelly bean size, diffused, LED combinations of red, yellow and green are wired so they light sort of progressively. The combinations require some to need more voltage before they light up. That was part of the experiment.
This one lights a pair of red LEDs at 40RPM, a red and a yellow at 60RPM, all are light at 75~90RPM.
The AC nature and low RPM requirements make the LEDs flash.
The paint is bright red and bright yellow. Looks good with the green PVC blades.
The photos would look better if I waited for the clouds to clear, probably July?
The blades could be a little longer to overcome the cogging sooner, and the tips could be a little wider, but they were here. Epoxyed the pulley to the hub, screws through the drilled rim. Balanced the blades with a belt sander. I love hot glue.
Decided what direction I would see it from. The good side faces my house. The neighbor is out of luck. Did I mention I love hot glue?
This motor has high coil resistance. 100 ohms per coil, or 100 ohms from any lead to the common, 200 ohms from any lead to any other. I used 100 ohm resistors, if in doubt use around 500 ohms.
Battery charging can be done with 4 diodes where the resistors are shown, paralleled to the battery positive, the common wire to the battery negative.
Even number wire count tends to give better battery charging results. Never can tell.
This took 8 or 10 hours, including testing, digging through parts, finding lost tools, clean up... everything, including the spray paint drying. Again used pieces removed from the kitchen remodel, trim, paneling, telephone wire, etc.
"K" because I'm sending it to my niece Katie for some inspiration.
I feel a lot can be learned playing with this kind of project.
G-