how to wire a stepper motor?

I have a five wire stepper motors along with a four wire bipolar stepper motor. I'm not sure if my five wire stepper is bipolar or unipolar but it seems unipolar. I also have the stepper driver from makerbot.com: [store.makerbot.com]

How can I wire my 5 wire stepper with the bipolar 4 wire stepper driver?

Thanks,
Drummerboyx

Its probably got the 2 center taps commoned together, so one of wires will be connected to all 4 others. Figure out which one that is and don't connect it to anything. Then you can just connect the 2 pairs and use the motor as a bipolar unit.

I'm not sure what wire is the center tap. Here are all the colors of the wires: blue, black, yellow, green, and red. Maybe if you have this info you can tell me what the center tap is.

Thanks for your help,
Drummerboyx

You can figure it out if you have an ohm meter/multimeter. Just connect wires to the ohm meter until you find a wire that is connected to all of them.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2009 07:50PM by M.qrius.

Two phase steppers have 4,5,6 or 8 wires and unfortunately the 5 wire version is the only one not suitable for a bipolar driver.

If it is a constant voltage driver you would get away with it because no matter which way the coils are energised each centre tap will be about half the supply voltage, so connecting them together will have little effect.

With a chopper drive the centre taps are not always at half supply voltage, for example during slow decay cycles they will be close to one rail. That means if you connect them together you will get a bizarre current pattern indeed.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Thanks for all your help!

Use the following program to identify the wiring and common.
[techref.massmind.org]

You'll really want to beg, borrow, buy or steal a DMM, ohm meter or the like.

I picked up two of the cheapest DMMs at Harbor Freight a few days ago (US store for all things tool related specializing in cheap Chinese copycat tools, many of them are quite good for the money) They were on sale for US $4 each. I assume it should be sufficent to built all the electronics and test the random unmarked stepper motor.

There really isn't any standard for color coated wires on steppers. Sorry about that.