Using steppers for something else

[ChristianW]

How difficult is it to control the steppers manually/programatically?

I've long been thinking of building a cd-changer robot. Wouldn't steppers be perfect for this type of job?

I'm not quite sure how to design the machine yet though. But I'm thinking I shouldn't need to use more than 2 motors, one for up and down and one for side to side. I could place 2 or 4 drives in a tower and a spindle beside it. Then it would be just for the "arm" to go to the right height, slide in over the cd, lower to grab it (that's a tricky part though ), lift it slightly, slide out, and put it on the "finished" spindle
And the other way around for inserting a CD.

The software-part of it I could probably do myself. But it's all down to creating the steppers, and make it so easy that I can tell the stepper to "go to tray1, pick up cd, go to dropzone, drop cd, go to pickupzone, pickup cd, go to tray 1, drop cd, go to restzone" sort of.

You see what I'm aiming for?

Christian...

[nophead00]

Hi Christian,
Here is a link to my blog where I showed my 400 CD jukebox being dismantled [URL="http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2007/06/day-music-died.html"]

The disks were lifted by an arm with a suction cup. The raidial motion was by a stepper motor with a gearbox and the vertical motion was a DC motor and gearbox.

The software ran on an MC6809 microprocessor system but knowadays you would either use a microcontroller like a PIC or a stepper controller that is driven from a PC parallel port.