Driving a DC Brushless (Hard Drive) Motor?

So, my situation:

I just tore apart an old Seagate hard drive and was pleased to salvage a fairly hefty brushless DC spindle motor that was used to turn the drive platters. It's made of solid aluminum and has three terminals on the back. I would really like to start testing its capabilities.The only problem is that I have basically no knowledge of how to drive the motor with my Arduino and could not find much info on the web. I have quite a bit of experience driving steppers and assume this would be similar. However, I did read that these motors operate best with a sinusoidal waveform, which I might try to approximate. I am aware that there are are drivers out there secifically for brushless motors. However, I would like to keep it simple, using just the arduino to produce the alternating current and a darlington array to step up the voltage from an external DC supply.

But anyways, my main question is just what the three terminals of the motor do and how I can get any rotation out of this thing using my Arduino. Thanks for any suggestions!

just by a BEC ESC RC Speed Controller :grin:
my video on (brushless motor taken from a 2.5 Inch hard disk the size of 5 cents - YouTube)

:grin:

:smiley:

Thanks for the videos. But what I'm talking about is driving the motor straight from the Arduino using only homemade H bridges.