X27.168 Low Power Stepper Motor
Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2021 9:30 pm
Back in early October 2021, Stephen put me onto a rather nifty little Stepper Motor, behold the: X27.168.
There isn't much info available out there, however a kind person has written an Arduino driver software and collected datasheets etc (https://github.com/clearwater/SwitecX25), so that's a handy kick off to my project. You can buy these from Aliexpress and a controller IC, the: AX1201728, which is a replacement for the: X12.017 controller IC. This IC can drive up to four X27.168 stepper motors. You can reportable drive the stepper motor directly from a 5V based ATMEGA, like the Nano or Uno. My stepper motors and controller IC's arrived this week, so I immediately created a CAD model in Design Spark Mechanical, exported it as a OBJ file, and then used FreeCAD to turn that into a nice STEP file suitable for importing into KiCAD (See: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2427). I then created a KiCAD footprint for the stepper motor and created a simple single motor PCB and uploaded it to JLCPCB for manufacture. Here it is as a KiCAD model: The Chinese version of the X28.168 motor is not quite physically up to spec, compared with the X27 datasheet I found online, but it should (hopefully), fit the PCB I designed up for it.
and the backside, with the two coil connectors:
It's about 30mm across and about 9mm tall. The spindle can rotate reputably at 600 degrees/second at 5V and drawing around 22mA. As you can imagine, there is little to no torque, and only good at driving an indicator needle. These stepping motors are used in a few car dash indicator dials.There isn't much info available out there, however a kind person has written an Arduino driver software and collected datasheets etc (https://github.com/clearwater/SwitecX25), so that's a handy kick off to my project. You can buy these from Aliexpress and a controller IC, the: AX1201728, which is a replacement for the: X12.017 controller IC. This IC can drive up to four X27.168 stepper motors. You can reportable drive the stepper motor directly from a 5V based ATMEGA, like the Nano or Uno. My stepper motors and controller IC's arrived this week, so I immediately created a CAD model in Design Spark Mechanical, exported it as a OBJ file, and then used FreeCAD to turn that into a nice STEP file suitable for importing into KiCAD (See: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2427). I then created a KiCAD footprint for the stepper motor and created a simple single motor PCB and uploaded it to JLCPCB for manufacture. Here it is as a KiCAD model: The Chinese version of the X28.168 motor is not quite physically up to spec, compared with the X27 datasheet I found online, but it should (hopefully), fit the PCB I designed up for it.