Floppy Disk Driver
Ruby
Posts: 35
Hi everybody. I was looking for an easy way to control bipolar motor than i found that i can use floppy disk driver. If i change the motor will it work?
Comments
Your question really lacks some specifics. A floppy disk drive has more than on motor inside and they function both somewhat independently and differently. Usually, there is a stepper motor that locates the individual tracks and there is a more conventional motor to spin the disk past the read/write head.
These are only a couple of types of motors, there are more and each has individual design issues with control.
Consider this list.
1. Stepper Motors - Bipolar or Unipolar
2. Brushed DC motors
3. Brushed 2 pole AC motors, sychronous
4. Brushless 3 pole AC motors
Size and hefty power adds more items to this list. And so, what exactly do you hope to do? Pick and appropriate motor first and then consider appropriate control.
It certainly would be nice if we could dig all and everything we need out of a junk box. But these days, recycle seems to abscond with goodies before we get a chance. You may have to build from scratch or buy and appropriate controller. Parallax has an excellent H-Bridge for power and Polou seems to provide a wide range of niche motor controllers for teenie-tiny bots.
BTW, if you meant that you have a 'bipolar stepper' motor that you want to adapt, I suspect that the answer is likely 'No'. Floppy drives have extremely tiny low power stepper motors in them now. A large stepper motor is likely to just fry the control chips. And even if you could use it, how are you going to feed positioning information to it. This is all rather roundabout when you consider a BasicStamp or a Propeller can do the task much more directly - you just have to add appropriate drivers, either ULN2008 for low power or a few TIP130s for serious power.
It sounds like you need a chip that provides enough current to run the coils and generates signals among several pins for powering the multiple motor coils.
You may be able to find an actual stepper driver chip on a floppy drive itself, and that may do what you want. You'll probably be better off doing this with older floppies with DIP chips; newer ones use surface mount chips which are harder to work with.
Try to read numbers off the chips on the floppy unit and Google the numbers - if you get lucky and find a data sheet, it should tell you enough to be able to make it work. Good luck!