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
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.
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.
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?)
Good idea though, it would be a nice opportunity for it.