It may not seem like much, but this photo is of my first Arduino hardware setup (LEDs not included) – a stepper motor. It’s a 28BYJ-48, and connected to my Arduino via a ULN2003 driver board.

The rest? I used a breadboard (still with some leftover components, seen the left left) as the holder to carry in my motor power from a wall wart/adapter. Because I didn’t have any female-to-male 0.1″ connectors, I made do by cutting and stripping an old disk drive cable (which fit over the pins nicely), and I used a CD-ROM audio cable to hook up the power. Alligator clips bridged the connections from the end of the ribbon cable to the male-male wires I used to go into the Arduino’s pins (once I get my female-female hookup wires it will cut down on the clutter).

Messy, but it worked, and I now have a stepper motor running:

More to follow…