floppy drives

[dertsap]

i see people post about floppy motors but never about the drivers ,is it not possible to hack a floppy driver and connect it to the parallel port ,i was looking at the pinout http://www.interfacebus.com/PC_Floppy_Drive_PinOut.html
it has dir and step , i m not looking at this as a diy table but i thought it would be interesting for me and my boys to play with

[Robin Hewitt]

They used to fit nice little steppers that could be extracted back in the days of 5 1/4" and 8" but that all went away with the 3.5" drives when the motor became part of the steel pressing.

The original IBM PC came with a Tech Ref manual that included the circuit for the floppy drive controller and full code for the BIOS that drove it. I still have them.

There are Home and Seek commands that will turn the motor, but not very far

[rippersoft]

I took apart 2 5 1/4" floppies this weekend and the drive motor appears to be a 3 phase servo drive. The head controller is a small unipolar stepper something like NEMA 17.

I am going to rewind the servo motor to be a small wind charger generator. The steppers will go to other projects like tilting small solar panels to the sun.

RipperSoftware