How would you test a stepper motor (without electronics or minimal)

Well building my first reprap well ordering what I can afford salvaging what I may as well.
so here's my question how can I just test if a stepper I pulled out of a printer is working? just looking for a bare minimum test to make sure the thing is not burned out
What I got to work with hmmmm

I dun have the pololu drivers yet they'll have to wait till next month since I'm on a tight budget.
I do have an experimental heathkit et3100 and that does have a breadboard on it hmm a few resistor's caps and I think I got a few transistors laying around albeit that not very large ones.
all I want to do is to see if the darn motors work and well there designed in a way that you can't just slap power on them a little hint woul;d be nice
terramir

Switching on the printer while it was still assembled?

Other than that, it's difficult without a stepper driver. With a stepper driver you can do single steps if you wire up all the pins and touch/untouch the DIR pin.

---

Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Hey, this response may be too late, but for future reference it is quite easy to test a unipolar motor, assuming you have an adjustable power supply and a multimeter.

For a unipolar stepper motor (5 wires coming out of it), one of the leads (usually black) will be common to all the others. This means that if you take an ohmmeter and test the resistance from the black wire to any one of the other four wires you will see a small resistance (the only resistance between these wires is the copper winding inside the motor. If you test the resistance between any two of the other wires it should be twice the resistance between a winding and common.

So to get it to turn all you have to do is connect the common wire (black) to the common on your power supply (also known as the grounding terminal, although calling it that is not quite correct), and connect a simple switch between your supply voltage and each of the other non-black wires.

With the voltage from your power supply limited quite low (I start at about 3V and creep upwards from there if it seems too low. Don't push it higher than 5V if the motor isn't moving, stepper motors have quite low internal resistance), flick one of the switches on. The motor should give a little jerk as it finds the step. Now turn the first switch off, and turn a different one on.

There you go, it will now be stepping. If it keeps jerking back and forth when you turn on switches, keep changing the order that you turn them on in until it goes forward with every step. I recommend trying 1,3,2,4.

I have never used a bi-polar stepper before, but I imagine you could do something similar with four Double Pole switches. (one pole connects to common, the other to voltage).

I highly recommend purchasing a stepper driver board, such as the Easy Driver (sparkfun.com) which only costs $15 dollars and can drive small bipolar and unipolar steppers.

use a multimeter to test the leads, there should be 2 coils with the same resistance. The 2 coils may have center taps as well which will be half the resistance of the coil.

We recently made a short video showing how to test bipolar stepper motors without a multimeter or power source; hope this helps!
[youtu.be]