Lex Kravitz has designed a ULN2003-based stepper driver board in the Feather board format:
I have several projects that use stepper motors and wanted a simple Feather wing. While Adafruit already makes a Feather motor driver, I designed my own because I wanted to have some buttons and LEDs, as well as a TRRS input port. Costs ~$4 in parts, plus the PCB.
This Feather Wing was made to be hand assembled with through-hole components, which I find easier to put together in small runs. In the future I may make a version with SMD components as well for professional manufacture. I made this to control 5V 28BYJ-48 steppers that are easily available for ~$2-3 each. Often they come with a ULN2003 driver board, if you are thrifty you can grab the chip off the board and move it to this board saving ~50 cents per board.
This board contains:
1) Two 3-pin headers (GND, PWR, and SIG). These can be used to control a servo or additional sensor.
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
