Electronic – Inner structure of a bipolar stepper motor

One important factor when working with stepper motors is hold torque. You can do some simple calculations based on your camera weight and platform radius to determine the torque due to gravity, and your hold torque should be a fair about larger than that or the motor will slip. You'll also need stepper motor drivers in order to control the motors and provide enough current as well as the proper signal to control the motor. I've had experience with the Pololu A4988 I'm conjunction with Arduino; it's simple to use and only used 2 digital IO pins (at minimum). You can also spare more pins and control things like the driver enable, etc. As for actually choosing a motor, that can be tough. I'd pick a price range and form factor that you'd like to be within and use that to narrow it down. I'd also stay away from the spark fun motors as they are usually on the more expensive end and not the best bang for the buck.

Assuming that the outputs of your brushed drivers are a voltage or current proportional to the commanded speed, you can certainly drive a bipolar stepper with two brush drivers. Let's assume that the output of a driver set for 100 gives exactly the drive current needed by a stepper, and that -100 gives exactly the current needed, but with opposite polarity. Then the two driver channels can be driven like this:

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

The position of the stepper motor is given by the relative amplitudes of the two phases. In this case, the requirement is that they be 90 degrees apart. In the figure, reading from left to right gives rotation in one direction, while reading from right to left gives rotation in the opposite direction. Always keep track of what step you are at, and only change the drives so as to move one step to the right or left.