Stepper motors for free:
If you can find any old IBM 5 1/4 inch disk drives there is a pretty good stepper motor inside, that was used to position the head. It is a unipolar drive (a common lead connected to all the windings) you just sequentially connect the coils to ground through a driver circuit. The windings are for 12 volts and don't draw too much current. These stepper motors also do fine on 5 volts, but the torque is reduced, but not bad. You will have to really squeeze the shaft with your fingers to stall the motor even at 5 volts. I have used several in various projects. Free is the best price. Some of the older 20 meg hard disk drives also had a good stepping motor.
Hold on to the plotter, If I can find a driver I will share it. The plotter may not be enough to hold and run a Dremel tool, but it is a precision instrument and an application may present itself.
HP does not list the old plotters on their site. There is a plotter driver for HPGL2 (Hewlett Packard Graphics Language) in XP, but it does not work with the original HP plotters (I guess that that version was HPGL 1.0 ;-)
The problem is microsoft XP to the original HPGL.  |