I fancy having a crack at building a robot with some stepper motors.. Has anyone ever tried anything like this or messed around with stepper motors?
Reason why I want to have a go at this is because I want to try building a labour saving machine to automate some repetitive tasks I do in my business (filling up bags with salt and putting liquids into bottles). I've got some idea of how it might look and work, and drawn up some rough plans..
What I'm thinking is a kind of big round wheel shaped thing with holes for the bottles/bags (with clips mounted to hold them)..a stepper motor turns the wheel around to position each bag/bottle below a large funnel shaped container, and there's a cover at bottom which goes back and forth, controlled by a very fast stepper motor, to release the contents..obviously that would be timed and calibrated for the right quantity to be dispensed.
I've got the dispensing part pretty much sussed, but not sure how I would go about making the wheel turn..stepper motors are usually tiny eh, that would take some serious torque and motor power.. (it will be several kg of weight as each bag weighs 200g and I want to do like 10-20 bags at a time on it...plus theres the size of the thing to consider..it will be the size of a small round kitchen table. Maybe an e-bike motor running very slowly connected to a stepper motor controller or controlled from a PC prog would work? So when the thing has finished and done all the bags/bottles, it stops and sounds a buzzer, and then the operator removes them and reloads with new bags/bottles..
Am I completely bonkers to even try it, or should I try and build something?
Maybe it could be a load of money and time wasted and would never work? Or maybe it might just work and could be a small investment which would pay for itself in time saving many times over?
Stepper motor £1.50 and controller board £5 from China.
There's a UK robotics/automation seller has some really decent kit too for reasonable prices. Like these 2 stepper motors with controllers, for £13:
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Reason why I want to have a go at this is because I want to try building a labour saving machine to automate some repetitive tasks I do in my business (filling up bags with salt and putting liquids into bottles). I've got some idea of how it might look and work, and drawn up some rough plans..
What I'm thinking is a kind of big round wheel shaped thing with holes for the bottles/bags (with clips mounted to hold them)..a stepper motor turns the wheel around to position each bag/bottle below a large funnel shaped container, and there's a cover at bottom which goes back and forth, controlled by a very fast stepper motor, to release the contents..obviously that would be timed and calibrated for the right quantity to be dispensed.
I've got the dispensing part pretty much sussed, but not sure how I would go about making the wheel turn..stepper motors are usually tiny eh, that would take some serious torque and motor power.. (it will be several kg of weight as each bag weighs 200g and I want to do like 10-20 bags at a time on it...plus theres the size of the thing to consider..it will be the size of a small round kitchen table. Maybe an e-bike motor running very slowly connected to a stepper motor controller or controlled from a PC prog would work? So when the thing has finished and done all the bags/bottles, it stops and sounds a buzzer, and then the operator removes them and reloads with new bags/bottles..
Am I completely bonkers to even try it, or should I try and build something?
Maybe it could be a load of money and time wasted and would never work? Or maybe it might just work and could be a small investment which would pay for itself in time saving many times over?Stepper motor £1.50 and controller board £5 from China.
There's a UK robotics/automation seller has some really decent kit too for reasonable prices. Like these 2 stepper motors with controllers, for £13:
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