During my learning and exploration of stepper motor control, I managed to destroy an optical carriage I salvaged from a laptop drive. In order to continue experimentation I need another stepper motor linear actuator of some kind. I rummaged in my pile of parts and came up empty-handed, but I am fortunate to have another local resource: Emily's pile of parts. My request was granted with an assembly that had an intact motor, drive screw, and linear carriage. The optical assembly in that carriage had been torn apart, but that is irrelevant for the purposes of this project.

Unlike the previous two stepper motors I played with, this one has exposed pads on the flexible control cable so I tried to solder to them. Given my experience soldering fine pitched parts, I knew it's problematic to solder one at a time: they are so close together heat from one pad will melt solder on an adjacent pad. My best bet is to set things up so all the wires are soldered at the same time.

Emily salvaged stepper motor wiringThere is slightly less solder than I would have preferred on each of these joints, but several efforts to add solder created solder bridges across pins. Requiring removal by solder sucker, which reduced the amount of solder even more. Since there was enough for electrical conductivity, I left it as is to continue my experiments.

Unrelated to stepper motors or Grbl:

While I was taking the above picture to document my work, I noticed I was being watched and took a picture of the watcher. This little beauty was surveying my workbench perched on top of a cardboard box of M3 fasteners from McMaster-Carr. The spider was only about 5mm long overall including legs. Unfortunately at the time of this shot I had set it for shallow depth of field to photograph the above solder joint. I adjusted my camera to bring more into focus, but this little one was camera shy and jumped away before I could take a better shot. Still, I'm quite pleased with my camera's macro lens.

Spider on McMaster Carr box