The first steps...

Please note, this post do contain a few jargons. Dun worry, if you dint get them, it doesnt matter much.

It was around 1500hrs on 24th, saturday. Me, gautam, karan and aakash in the instrumentation technology lab. /* Great minds at work :P */ We were mainly trying to realise a stepper card and test our steper motor. /* If you dunno what it is, dun worry, lemme explain, briefly. Stepper motor is a kind of motor, which rotates in steps. The number of steps can be controlled, hence you can get a controlled rotatory motion. They are considered to be among the best options available for controlled motion. Now the stepper card, you can consider it as a sweet and simple electronic circuit with a few ICs, which helps you to control and drive the stepper motor. */
So, the great minds were busy in fabricating there own stepper card using the ICs in the lab. Well we did make a few alterantions, used a signal generator instead of a timer ciruit /* if u dun get it, fine, no probs, its not much important*/. Basically we wished to see the stepper motor rotating. It was our first experience with stepper motor. A few days back, we learnt the basic fund of the stepper card from a senior, but never saw it bieng implemented. Fine, I do possess some experience in electronic circuitery /* courtesy APOGGE 2006*/ and gautam had his junior college experience added to his APOGEE experience. We were pretty confident to get the first steps from our stepper motor. We prepared the requiered circuitery on the breadboard. Made a few checks for our shift register using LEDs. Corrected our circuit a bit. After that, connected our whole circuit with the stepper motor.
It must work.
Switched the signal generator on.
Adjusted its frequency and output voltage.
Switched on the power supply to our circuit.
It must work.
But obviously, it dint.
If you are a good programmmer, your program will never work as expected in the first run. If you are a good electonic enginner /* I guess, that's a better word than electricain :P */, your circuit will never work in the first run.
The behaviour of our circuit confirmed my statement.
We made a few checks, dint alterned anything in the circuit though. Switched it on, dint worked, repeated the cycle once or twice more. This time we were just analysing the circuit again, without switching it off.
I brought my face closer to the motor, heard some movement. Took the motor in hands, and hey, it was moving, though randomly. The random movement can be explained for we dint knew the sequence of the wires in the motor. So, those random movements meant our circuitery was working.
Bingo!!!
Our aim was also to find out the proper sequence of the wires of the motor, it was hit and trial /* alas, we dint get the datasheet for our motor on the net*/. Altered the wire sequence once, result, random motion. No problem, lets give another try. This time, we did succeed. The motion was unidirectional. Yeah!!!
But hey, we still dint get the result we expected. The motor was rotating in one direction, the speed was controlled by frequency we provided from the function generator. But there was this one thing...
As soon as someone comes close to it, it starts rotating and stops as soon as the person moves away. And within a minute, the motor showed its loyalty towards me. It was like... if I come close to the motor, if rotates, I move away, it stops. With the other three, its behaviour was rather random, but with me, it always did it like, rotates as I come close, stops as I move away. We did make sure that our movement donot affect the circuitery anyhow, but to our surprise, the stepper motor was workin as a sensory motor, being perfectly sensitive to me :P. We tried with other motor, it worked kinda o.k. initially, but after a minute or so, it followed the same trend. Our reaction... first of all, we were really really happy, we were actually able to rotate the motor in our first trial. And that behavoiur, well, I'll prefer saying, that loyal behaviour :P was astonishing us, more than it was worrying us.
Though, till the end of the day, we were not able to figure out the reason for its loyalty towards me, we were really happy.
Celebrated the evening in Sky /* for non-BITSian, its a really nice place to hang out, with Pappuji's Skylab close in, which is the only place were we do get some good burger and pizzas in pilani. */. One burger was not enough, but we soon realised that it was veg-grub in our mess that night /* for non-BITSian, veg-grub = some tasty food in mess*/. So the celebration lasted till night. But we had to sleep early, we had to leave for delhi the next morning.

FIND OF THE DAY : There is not much difference in Computer Science and Electronics. Neither a good program nor a good circuit works in the first run. :P