5 1/4 Floppy drive Stepper Motors

[High Seas]

Ok - I've got the dumpster diving bug. But before I go too deep - has anyone out there used the steppers out of 5.25 floppy drives. Seems a fellow (Fixxit) had mentioned it and I was looking for any other details that mght be had.
I'm thinking about maybe a hot wire setup - foam cutting etc - and thought it'd be cool to do it all low end bits - these motors, drawer slides etc.
1. Any estimate to their torque?
1a. Max rpm?
2. Are they NEMA 17 - or smaller?
3. Are they all Unipolar?
4. Got any good recommendationds for a controller card - maybe a PIC kit or something like that?
Well, thats enuf for now - TIA!
Cheers - Jim

[panaceabea]

allegro makes a nice driver chip for about 5 bucks ucn5804b I belive, upto 35 volts at 1.5 amps seems to work well with steppers from disk drives type in eggbot on any search engine and check out one application for these "free" motors

[High Seas]

Wow - Thanks for that! I'm doing some sleuthing on those - Cheers - Jim
BTW - the Egg-bot is too cool!

[lt paul]

acutually that chip is ussualy built in to the floppy drive if you get the pinout for the drive connector you will see that it has two "pins" for pulse and direction drive. thus all youneed to do is hack and solder your power,gnd and drive conections right to the board.

[High Seas]

Cool - Now I'm glad I saved some of those bits too!
Wonder what chips are in the printers - Hmmm - I have something else to learn! Thanks - Jim

[panaceabea]

thanks I am going out to look over the boards from the drives now for usable chips. Look at the sand plotter the eggbot guy builds also, I planed to rip into a couple of old printers to build a small/tabletop version,

[ESjaavik]

High Seas: Don't expect much RPM from them. Most of them are rated for 12V. That means to get a "high" speed you would be looking for up to 300V drive!! Of course I don't suggest you try that, as the insulation rating is probably far from that. I'm talking chopper drive of course.

So just go as high as you can in voltage and live with the speed you get. The best ones are the older that were almost a cube shape http://www.metallhobby.net/Lopper/DSCN1761.JPG . The later round-flat type http://www.metallhobby.net/Lopper/DSCN1761.JPG are less desirable. They often had sintered bearings too, not ball bearings like the older ones. I guess they found out the stepper was not the component that got worn out, so they lowered the specs on it.

[High Seas]

ESjaavik - Yeah, I'd say that you're quite right on the specs dropping as they learned more about the failure of the components. I have quite a collection of the history of the motors used in these things. The newest are quite small - and "cute" at best - the earlier "cubes" look beefy and are what I'll use. You can find a few good ones in printers and scanners too - but the same thing - older have more "Beef". And BTW there is little standardization, from 4 wire Bipolar to 5 & 6 wire Unipolars - frequentally the same brand/manufacturer! And, low speed is not too big a deal -- if you don't have far to go!
Jim

[Rance]

For the record, I think ESjaavik meant http://www.metallhobby.net/Lopper/DSCN1762.JPG for the OLD cube one.

[BeanO]

RE:ucn5804b
Ya!, these chips are great!, easy to hook up, nothing else needed!
I'm using them for "demo/test"