Foolin around with an old floppy drive

[compuslave]

I have a question that was answered here before but did not work for me. I have an old floppy tore apart and using it's native control board am attempting to at least get it to move. The problem is I don't use windows, I don't even have a copy of windows. I can't find how to experiment with this thing in linux. I compiled ltpout but it did not work. I have emc2, will that work? Its on the live disk and I haven't tried it yet.

Basically I just want to move it around a bit and experiment. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW I'm using Ubuntu if that helps.

[compuslave]

I found EMC to move the steppers quite readily but not very well. Thats all I wanted to do though was see some movement.

[dertsap]

emc2 works with steppers

[FlyingElectron]

Have you got it hooked up correctly?

Try grounding floppy controller pin 14 "Drive Select A" and pin 1 "GND" to parallel port pin 20 "GND".
Then hook up floppy controller pin 18 "Direction" to parallel port pin 2 "D0"
Then hook up floppy controller pin 20 "Step" to parallel port pin 3 "D1"
And make sure the floppy drive is powered up with the power connector which supplies both +5V and +12V.

EMC2 should work with that wiring with the standard pinout for stepper motors.

I haven't actually tried any of this, so proceed at your own risk, but it should work.

[rickharris]

Hello, Although using the floppy controller board seems logical it introduces a lot of problems/issues because it was intended to do a specific job (probably not what ou want to do)

More control can be gained by using a pic micro controller. http://www.picaxe.com is a good place to start - a UK company but available in USA and other countries.

Relatively easy to control, fairly low cost and free programming software ( I am nothing to do with them just a user.

[FlyingElectron]

Hello, Although using the floppy controller board seems logical it introduces a lot of problems/issues because it was intended to do a specific job (probably not what ou want to do)

I'd agree with you most of the time on that statement, but in this particular case, the floppy drive controller does exactly the job that is needed. Wierd bit of history, all the modern stepper driver boards that use step / dir signals are all descendants of the stepper driver circuitry on an IBM PC floppy drive. The IBM PC floppy drive introduced in 1981 is the product that standardized the concept of the step / dir driver as we know it today. Wow, that was the most useless piece of trivia ever to come out of my brain about stepper motors.

[rdpzycho]

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.

[jessbussert]

Try these two sites... They helped me get my floppy drive steppers spinning.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/
http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/diskstepper.html

Great stuff.
Jessica

[High Seas]

Hers another site with some good info to add:
http://www.nhcad.com/flpystpr/

cheers - Jim

[rdpzycho]

I love using cheap PC power supplies..good power at cheap prices..they are always handy at the benchtop..I also love modifying them to produce more volts or source a little more amps..