An old floppy disk drive can be an excellent source of robotic parts.
Many amateur robot builders got different electronic and mechanical parts from
it. Unfortunately there are couple of traps and problems. One of
them appeared when we tried to reuse stepping motor from the old Mitsumi drives.
Here we come! The floppy without the cover. What
will be the first find?
Stepper motor. This is the reason why we bought this
floppy drive for $2.
Looks great, but let's take car about the other parts.
IR detector: great.
Very sensitive switches originally used for detecting
Read-Only toggle position.
Yeah, there is even more!
But here comes unpleasant surprise. The stepping motor
doesn't work! The problem is that the shaft must be supported at the
end. Otherwise there is too much friction to turn not centered
rotor. Let's cut the fragment of chassis, which allow us to use the
bearing.
Now it works
This is exactly what we need but the stepping motor is
no longer useful in micro robotics since it is built into this ugly piece of metal
from chassis. Should we switch to mini robotics?
All rights reserved.
For problems or questions regarding this web contact [Project Email].
Last updated: May 27, 2004.
