Stepper motors are nice. But they’re massive. And the little tiny ones aren’t really much use for tabletop/miniatures (a single “step” being a whole quarter turn in many cases, meaning they zip round way to fast to be useful for very much).

The 28BJY stepper motor, however, is fully geared. Something like 4092:1 (I know!) So it takes 4092 steps to do one complete revolution.

Now, all you base-2 nerds out there will immediately spot that when multiplying up by two, 256 becomes 512, becomes 1024, then 2048 and finally 4096. But I found, in practice, that these little things take a few steps under 4096 for a complete revolution. It’s hardly noticeable (though if you left one spinning for a few minutes, you’d notice that it’s stopping position would not be the same as the start position, if you rotated it in multiples of 4096 steps).

All this is by-the-by really. It’s just a great little stepper motor. And because it’s so heavily geared (inside the stepper motor is teeny-tiny and only has about 8 steps per revolution) it runs really quietly and can be driven pretty slowly. Which makes it great for a slow moving gantry, for example.

Here’s a quick and dirty laser-cut framework for a moving Jabba’s throne (to reveal the drop into the Rancor Monster pit). @avernos said no golden buttons without audio and movement. I thought I’d cracked it with my Knight Rider/KITT project (currently on hiatus) but since I’ve been having such fun painting up Star Wars characters, I thought I’d add a bit of life to my Jabba’s Palace diorama instead (or maybe as well….)