Conserving battery life in a stepper motor circuit
You may be a little confused.

The intent of connecting the enables to the micro is so you can turn off the motors when you are not repositioning. That is, the motors should hold position by means of the detent torque of the motors themselves and consume no power while stationary.

That of course assumes the motors will hold position when unpowered. The mechanism should be balanced appropriately to allow for that.

In order to do that you would really need independent control over both motors. The up down motor only needing to be powered briefly at the end of each horizontal scan.

As such, you would need two IO pins for enables and four pins for the winding control pins. (Though since you are only running one motor at a time, you can get away with two pins for this.)







simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab

HOWEVER: A bigger issues you will face is the 293 is not suitable for running things at 5V. The device can not drive close enough to the rails to provide your required drive voltage. See this cross-post