This week I gave the Roland Modela a shot and found it quite straightforward and yielded good results. The stuffed board below was photographed after several rounds of troubleshooting and debugging so it looks a bit beat up.

After loading a bootloader using edbg I was able to send code to the board from the Arduino IDE over USB. The code I used is really just a simple modification of the stepper library example included with the Arduino IDE.

  
//This is a modification of the stepper library
//example included with the Arduino IDE

#include < Stepper.h >

 // change this to fit the number of steps per revolution of motor
const int stepsPerRevolution = 200;

//set output pins
Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 9, 14, 16, 22);

void setup() {

  //set motor speed
  myStepper.setSpeed(60);

  //setup serial connection if you desire
  Serial.begin(115200);

}

void loop() {
  // step one revolution  in one direction:
  Serial.println("clockwise");
  myStepper.step(stepsPerRevolution);
  delay(500);

}
  
  

At first my board wasn't working. I spent a lot of time debugging only to realize at a certain point that the motor I was using was rated for 12V and I was trying to power it using a 9V battery. Face palm.

I tried the benchtop power supply in the architecture shop set to 12V and lo and behold it worked!