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[on:]

Under a pile of junk in my room, I found two old 5.25" disk drives dating from 1984. Opened them up this morning; they each contain two of the most beautiful stepper motors I've seen in ages, and are old enough to have separate control boards - easily-human-alterable soldering - and lots of readably large labels on the PCBs for a human tester ("Bev", from the sticker!). Overengineered to the nines, from before these things were cheap.

Hurrah for not throwing anything away, ever!

Sorry to bother you, I just had to squee about this because the possibilities are distracting me from work

[Reply #1 on:]

Hurrah!!

I've salvaged about 20 steppers from various printers, floppy drives, scanners, etc. over the last few months. Now I just need to think of some use for them all.

[Reply #2 on:]

20! That's some good salvage. Your own robot legion?

[Reply #3 on:]

Yup that's the plan

[Reply #4 on:]

Awesome.

Did I see you mention (somewhere else) that you go to London Hackspace?

[Reply #5 on:]

Do I sense a London swap meet in the making?  

[Reply #6 on:]

I doubt I have things anyone would want, unfortunately Good idea though, it would be a nice opportunity for it.

[Reply #7 on:]

Yes I do go to Hackspace. I'll be at the next one. I'd sure be willing to swap some steppers for something useful at Hackspace.

[Reply #8 on:]

Ace! I didn't make it to the last one but I hope to make it to the next. I can generally be identified by my three cornered hat and by being a slightly-out-of-my-depth Arduino newbie. (Familiar enough with general electronics, but hadn't touched it for years - introduced to Arduino at the Hackspace-before-last - now I'm an addict and my sleep patterns seem to be suffering)

I recently bought a tube of ULN2004 transistor arrays for driving steppers, and I have rather more than I have steppers, I'd love to swap a few for a few if these would be useful to you. Otherwise I'm a bit short on cool stuff at the moment.

[Reply #9 on:]

Sure I can spare a few. I'll bring them along to the next one (presuming it's on the 20th).

[Reply #10 on:]

Thank you! Although looking at the relative component values, I realise that is not a v fair swap so I shall have to try to bring some other things too, somehow. (any particular interests?)

Yes, they say the 20th. See you there.

[Reply #11 on:]

Not sure really. Bring what you've got and i'll have a rummage through the box.

[Reply #12 on:]

Thanks for that! And it was really nice to meet you.

[Reply #13 on:]

No problems. Hope you find some good use for the motors.