Lathe and Stepper Motor Part 1

I got a 7x14 Mini-Lathe for Christmas. I’m a complete beginner at using a lathe so this set of videos will mostly about setting up a stepper motor to drive the lathe lead screw. Using a motor on the lead screw will allow me to mostly sidetrack using the gears in the lathe (A weak point on these lathes). This is my first dive into using a stepper motor, so this video is mostly about getting familiar with it and a look at the design I am planning to connect it to the lead screw on the lathe.

00:00 Introduction. Plans for this set of videos. I will mostly focus on adding a stepper motor to the lathe but am planning to have a deeper dive in part 2 of these videos explaining why I choose the model of lathe I did, and so basic setup tasks I performed before using it.
02:07 A look at the stepper motor and driver I purchased from amazon.
03:46 How am planning on controlling the stepper motor. I am planning on using a RPI Pico microcontroller to manage the speed, direction and enable the motor. I will use a rotary control to set the speed. For my use of the lathe, I will set it up so one knob controls the speed and direction.
05:41 Look at the Micropython code that is run on the RPI Pico to control the motor.
09:45 Initial test of the code to make sure it correctly sets the PWM frequency, and sets the correct Direction and Enable pin values based on the setting of the rotary encoder.
12:00 Hardware test to make sure the code correctly runs the motor. I also got an idea of the current use of the motor and how torque it is.
13:31 Lead screw torque. I did some measurements of the torque required to turn the lead screw when the lathe carriage is engaged. Roughly was 0.6lb at 15cm distance from the lead screw. (Sorry for the mix of units). I popped this into an online torque calculator to get the torque requirements in Nm.
14:27 Walk through of my design for the lead screw coupler. I work out a couple of cheep components from amazon will make this easier ( 14mm hex shank, drive coupler). I am thinking the motor will mostly stay engaged with the lathe lead screw but may want to slide it off when/if I want to do treading on the lathe.

Amazon – stepper motor and controller: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...
Amazon - 14mm to ¼ inch quick change hex shank: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...
Amazon – 6.3mm to 5mm drive coupler: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...
Torque Calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physic...
Rotary_IRQ library: https://github.com/miketeachman/micro...
Github code: https://github.com/somervda/stepper/t...