At 12:27 PM 9/12/99 -0500, you wrote:
>> All the emitters go to PIC ground, along with the negative of your wall
>> wart. Positive of the wall wart goes to the common(5 wire) or commons(6
>> wire) of your stepper. The four collectors each get a stepper lead. Put
>> resistors between PIC and base! Let's say 220 ohms.
>
>Another note here, don't try to run the stepper from the supply that feeds
>the micro.
>Separate supply (common ground) or batteries is easier to get working.

I can reiterate this advice.  The coils of your motor are giant inductors
across which you are switching full supply voltage.  When you start running
the thing quickly it will reset your micro.

When I built a micro-stepper motor driver for an art project I used a
couple of NPN's to drive the coils of a SPDT relay.  My motor had 4 wires
and I had to alternate between +/- voltages.  The order of alternations on
the wires caused to to turn in opposite directions.  The way I figured it
out is to use a multimeter to figure out which wires went with which coils
(there will be maybe 100 ohms resistance between pairs of wires).  Then I
sat there for about 20 minutes with a 5 volt power supply and and touched
wires here and there until I could get the thing to turn around and learn
the sequence.

It looked like an encoder :
00
10
11
01
00

was CW

and

00
01
11
10
00

was CCW.

Test out each individual part separately without the micro.... i.e. use
twisted wires and your relays/transistors to drive the motor by hand then
hook to your micro.  Make sure you start the pulse counting slow, because
if you go too fast you will saturate the relays as they have a max switch rate.

-Erik Reikes