STEPPER MOTOR

Frame 1: The top electromagnet (1) is turned on, attracting the nearest tooth of a gear-shaped iron rotor. With the teeth aligned to electromagnet 1, they will be slightly offset from electromagnet 2. Frame 2: The top electromagnet (1) is turned off, and the right electromagnet (2) is energized, pulling the nearest teeth slightly to the right. This results in a rotation of 3.6° in this example. Frame 3: The bottom electromagnet (3) is energized; another 3.6° rotation occurs. Frame 4: The left electromagnet (4) is enabled, rotating again by 3.6°. When the top electromagnet (1) is again enabled, the teeth in the sprocket will have rotated by one tooth position; since there are 25 teeth, it will take 100 steps to make a full rotation in this example.

A stepper motor (or step motor) is a brushless, synchronous electric motor that can divide a full rotation into a large number of steps. The motor's position can be controlled precisely without any feedback mechanism (see Open-loop controller), as long as the motor is carefully sized to the application. Stepper motors are similar to switched reluctance motors (which are very large stepping motors with a reduced pole count, and generally are closed-loop commutated.)
Stepper motors operate differently from DC brush motors, which rotate when voltage is applied to their terminals. Stepper motors, on the other hand, effectively have multiple "toothed" electromagnets arranged around a central gear-shaped piece of iron. The electromagnets are energized by an external control circuit, such as a microcontroller. To make the motor shaft turn, first one electromagnet is given power, which makes the gear's teeth magnetically attracted to the electromagnet's teeth. When the gear's teeth are thus aligned to the first electromagnet, they are slightly offset from the next electromagnet. So when the next electromagnet is turned on and the first is turned off, the gear rotates slightly to align with the next one, and from there the process is repeated. Each of those slight rotations is called a "step," with an integer number of steps making a full rotation. In that way, the motor can be turned by a precise angl