Stepper motors not working

ESPHome
1

I’ve been using esphomelib on nodemcu and wemos d1 successfully for switches, sensors and a rotary encoder, but I haven’t been able to get the uln2003 stepper motor to report to hassio as a state. Has anyone been successful using this device? No errors are reported, is there any way to debug this?

Scott

2

Hello Scott,

I also connected a uln2003 stepper motor to a NodeMCU. There is no error message in the ESPhome Dashboard and the upload is also running. Get the stepper motor but not integrated in Home Assistant. Have you already solved your problem? Or is someone else here who can help here?

When I try to integrate the stepper motor via the “Integrations”, this one appears …

Stepper
Stepper1173×414 21.6 KB

Thanks in advance

3

I’m using a wemos d1 r2 device and still haven’t gotten it to work. It does work fine in an arduino sketch. You should be seeing state information in the integration screen and in the debug->states feature. Another way to get information is to enable the web server in the config with the ‘web_server’ directive. You may also have to enable the debug and logging in the configuration file. Here is what my uln2003 setup looks like;

…
stepper:

  • platform: uln2003
    id: my_stepper
    pin_a: D5
    pin_b: D6
    pin_c: D7
    pin_d: D8
    max_speed: 250 steps/s

I went on to other things for now. I’m sure Otto will get it sorted out eventually, though he might not know that there is a problem with this yet. If you have time you might try to get his attention on this.
Good luck.

4

Steppers are internal components and won’t show up in HA. That’s because HA does not have a stepper abstraction and thus esphome can’t create an entity for it.

5

Otto,
First I want to saythanks for all your efforts in putting this all together.

From you reply I’m getting that we can only use MQTT to control uln2003 device?

6

Hello Otto,

Thanks for the great ESPHome add-on, works great

7

I have used the stepper component as I explain in other thread.

It is working fine, excepting this two things I do no t understand very well:

  • I need to power the uln2003 (200mA for motor and driver) drive separately from the nodeMCU 8266(I am going to say 400mA max), even if the components consume less than the power module that I am using (800mA). I will try with a wemos mini.

  • Using a slider (input_number) and an automation in HA to control the motor with the api service sometimes has unexpected behaviours. Not all the times you move the slider you get the motor move. I will do some more tests and check esp log.