ELEGOO 5 sets 28BYJ-48 5V Stepper Motor + ULN2003 Motor Driver Board for Arduino

The media could not be loaded.  I bought these for a curtain automation project. I hadn't used steppers before, so it was a bit of a learning experience. First thing I did was to try using the stepper.h library. Unfortunately I found that driver to be useless - I could stop the motor spindle turning by just grabbing it! So after some searching I found another library called accelstepper.h. I used the halfstep call. Honestly, it was almost as if I was using a different motor! No way could I stop the spindle when driving it at speed 300! If you go to 1000 speed, it runs faster, but it sacrifices the torque. For what I needed speed 250 is about 4rpm and good torque for opening a heavy curtain.Other things I found by trial and error. On the controller board there is a -+ for the voltage supply. I used two separate supplies; motor and arduino (an old router power supply was used). The two pins next to the supply connections control power to the motor. When the arduino goes to a setspeed(0) the motor will stop, but power is still supply to the motor so it will heat up. I didn't want to leave the motor 24hours/day heating up! By running these enable pins to a separate relay, the code can completely disable the motor when it doesn't need to run.Remove any uncessasary println commands in the code. Particularly in the main loop. It really slows down the motor. I spent a lot of time trying to work out why the motor was running slow.I bolted the motor onto a metal plate to act as a heatsink. The motor can run hot after a short time, and even though I'm running it for a few minutes each day, I wanted to increase the life of the motor by keeping it cool.

I purchased this set of stepper motors and driver boards to learn more about the low-level details of how stepper motors work. It's great value for money, and there are a lot of tutorials on the web for driving this combination of components. These tutorials are mostly for Arduino based systems, but it was fairly easy to take the principals and apply them to my testbed system (Raspberry Pi & PiFace digital I/O board, coding in Python). Bear in mind that these motors include a 64:1 gearbox, so you're not going to be running them at high speed, but they're a great learning resource.

Word of warning. Check the spindle shaft length. I bought these to replace motor with a faulty gearbox only to discover that the shaft length on the original motor was 12mm long but the shaft length on these motors are only 9mm, so can't be used as a replacement. Otherwise the motors are ok.

All motors were working perfectly and in good condition. Well packaged. Recommend.

Items arrived packaged well. PCB schematics and data sheets available for download from Elegoo website along with basic example code. A very useful kit for experimenting with stepper motors.

Very impressed with function and quality.I purchased these purely to learn something new on the arduino without spending too much money, the 5 pack seemed a good option (£2.40 per unit!) but I expected they would not be up to much. The quality is far better than expected and I will soon use them for something useful or fun.I used a tutorial ([...]) to get me started.The following Arduino lib was very helpful. [...]

Great way to learn about stepper motors. More powerful than I expected. Needed to swap 2 leads over to make them work as they should but now fine. They do get warm but have arranged to switch power off when not required.

Weak, other motors with same model number perform better. These are likely cheap knockoffs.