I have been doing quite a bit of work lately with Brushless DC motors.

These are rather expensive motors as are the drivers that are used to power them. However, these motor systems have some remarkable abilities.

I am working on integrating some of them into power wrappers and dryers. It will be interesting to see how they all work out.

[en.wikipedia.org]

I have a few small stepper motors, and had been thinking of building an automated dryer to sequence the turn by hand leveling process. A stepper can be made to rotate a precise amount by the number of "pulses" sent to it, so 180 degree rotations can be done easily and accurately. A 12V DC power supply, and a fairly simple four transistor drive circuit, are what's required to make the motor spin. The timing circuit, needed to make the correct number of pulses, and the variable time between pulse streams, is a bit more problematic.

I started on this last year by testing the motor. I found the ones I have will turn a rod at slow speed indefinitely without getting warm. Designing the digital control circuit with variable timing and counting was going slowly.

I've since acquired a micro PLC. I've scrapped the stepper motor idea, and plan to run my existing dryer motor hot lead through one of the PLC relay output contacts. The program to automate the leveling process will be a piece of cake.

I still want to experiment with the steppers. I'm thinking a wrapper with the kind of control one can get using stepper motors will be cool. Plus, you can can make one stop, and hold position, and reverse quite easily.

Gary,
I was in the same boat. i.e. I had some stepper motors, some controllers, but needed to do the programming to hook them together.
One day I was doing some wandering through the internet and came across some Oriental Motors, gear heads and drivers. After doing some checking I found that one could get some of these setups for a very reasonable price.

After getting a couple of units, I am sold. Easy to use, excellent control, no noise from the motor, no heat from the motor either. Instant stop and start. Instant reverse if one would wish it.

I will be using one unit for the power wrapper, and another unit for the stand alone drum dryer.

Be safe