I accidentally glitched out one of my programs and caused a stepper motor to vibrate uncontrollably. Of course, there’s stuff to learn everywhere. Instead of just fixing the glitch and moving on, I completely rewrote the code to deliberately take advantage of this and ended up being able to microstep the motor without any additional hardware.

And then came the problem of testing my code… it was a bit difficult because the angles are so small. Not to worry—that’s where lasers come in. A new motor with a mirror attached to it, a toy laser, and a ruler taped to the wall allows me to measure tiny angles, all the way down to 0.008 degrees!