Quick and dirty stepper-motor driver tripod turret

Of course, the first thing that came to mind, having committed to this model, was to put a plasma gun on the turrent and have a fancy, LED-driven, glowing plasma coil.

But this is a gun that swings around, pointing at multiple different targets. So it made sense to turn it into a gun that swings around, pointing at multiple different targets…

There’s a middle section in this piece which is mounted on top of a peg on the legs – it allows the top part to swivel around the z-axis.

If the peg could only be mounted on top of a motor, we could make it spin around using the magic of electricity. Except cheap hobby motors spin at something like 21,000 rpm (which might be a little bit too fast for our purposes!)

Somewhere deep in a drawer of salvaged parts, I came across a small stepper motor. It looks like it’s come out of an inkjet printer or a flatbed scanner or something. At just 16mm across, it was a perfect fit.

A quick bit of hacking in Blender and the legs had a hole just the right size to take the motor. The stepper motor already had a tiny cog fixed onto the shaft so by adding a blob of milliput inside the gun turret and smooshing the two together, I had a good, solid bond.

Having salvaged the motor from something else (quite possibly many years ago) there are no instructions readily available on how to use it – the part number has long ago worn off, and I’ve no idea what device I came from to try to look it up online!

A bit of poking about with a multimeter and looking up combined stepper motor driver datasheets and we should have this thing spinning…..