My local astronomy club came to me with a problem. The retractable 10' roof had a VERY old screw style garage door opener. We have gone back and forth with contractors to repair (because the motor was very old and we can't find a replacement. Also we ruled out replacing with conventional garage doors because we would have to do way more work.


So I volunteered to mount a stepper motor to replace the other small motor. I have some experience in this style of motion control having build a CNC from scratch. However building the machine for me was the easy part, making it move was another. Mach 3 software was already out there, and to make a long story short I volunteered myself to solve the problem. I have also built an auto focuser from an arduino (again using others programming) so I have loaded an existing code into an arduino. In both instances (my CNC & Auto-focuser) computers/software control the stepper motors. I dont think anyone wants to have to donate a computer to act as a simple garage door opener.

I am almost done mounting the Nema 23 stepper (which I had) to a helical coupler, and I have an arduino board. What I need is a power supply, and a motor controller. What we ultimately want, is to press a button and the stepper spins until it hits a limit switch to indicate the door is completely closed or opened.

I was wondering if anyone would have any advice on how to accomplish this?

The main reason I want to go this route, is steppers are cheap, easily found and replaceable. All components can fit in a project box and are replaceable. I can arguably get a few arduino's and pre-program them should that particular component fail.