some old drives have sensors that disable the motors if no disk is inserted. I encountered one that wasn't able to fully stop the motor instead the motor jerks and moves to some random position, maybe the drives were already defective. I had around 8 - 5.25" drives to play with before.
you could probably use EMC to drive them but I haven't tried it. though I tried driving a disk drive stepper using the parallel port and the internal controller. it wasn't able to push my small robot though, so I just quit that and had fun with the motor. it was my first attempt in making a wheeled bot. |