Servo motor vs stepper motor help

Can you restate the following, it can mean several things

I built a machine to assist with running in a small RC engine 

Welcome!

I think I'd agree with @zander... we need a little information on the actual project.    We can only tell that you are moving something/somehow with the stepper motor.  Whether its the right solution for your project can't be determined with the information you've provided.  Pictures and/or descriptions of what you want to achieve might get you some good answers from the forum.

VBR,

Inq

I’m breaking in high end RC airplane engines in a heated oil bath. These engine don’t use piston rings so the cylinder is slightly tapered to build compression. And the break in process is very important to the reliability of the engine. I connect a  RC engine to a stepper motor using a coupler and submerge just the RC engine in the oil bath. I heat the oil bath to a certain temp and then start the stepper motor running at a slow rpm. I run the stepper motor at a certain rpm for a certain amount of time. I then increase the rpm and decrease the temp of the oil bath. And so on and so on until the engine is fully broken in. It usually takes about 8-10 hrs to fully break in a engine. I’m currently using a stepper setup and it works well but the stepper gets really hot. I just don’t think I’m using the right device for the application. At some point in the very near future I want to connect this to a andrino unit and automate this process as much as possible. I don’t believe I will be able to automate the heating cycle but everything else should be able to be automated. It would be amazing if I could read the load against the motor to verify where I am in the breaking process but I might be pipe dreaming there. I’m not afraid to toss a little money at buying new equipment to make this machine. These engines run into the 1500 range and you only get about a season out of them so it’s fairly important to break them in gently and correctly. Hope this helps.

@sledracer1y WOW, really interesting project.

NOT AN EXPERT

I think a stepper is the right solution, but others may know of a way to reduce heat.

Increasing the RPM and decreasing the oil bath temp can easily be done with an arduino or any number of other MCU/MPU

I am not 100% sure but I am pretty sure reading the load is a simple matter of reading the stepper motor current draw.

I would normally refer you to another forum member but he is not available for a little while. In the meantime if you research steppers and arduino or other MCU/MPU of your choice then that would be a start. As far as the heating of the oil, it will depend on the method used now. To automate it will require the arduino using a logic level pin to control a variable ??? (2 answers depending on if AC or DC but both doable)

Measuring the stepper load means measuring the current draw on the pin. IIRC that is an analogue pin so searching on that may be a start but I bet another forum member will have a definitive answer in a few minutes.

Keep us informed, this is a super cool project for us old techies.