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How to control bipolar stepper?

S

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Hi
I have two hard drives, and i noted that the motor has 4 cables, so now i know that it has a bipolar stepper motor...
So, the question is.. How i can control it? :p
If is too hard so make the circuit... How i can identify the part on the hard drive PCB that controls the motor? And how i can use it?

Thanks for all :)
 





S

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No, i'm talking about the motor of the disks, not the voice coil

EDIT: The motor has 4 cables, so I tried connecting one coil (two cables) to the sound and the other coil (the other 2 cables) to a 4.5DC source.. With this configuration it works
so nice, better than the voice coil actuator, but, I am right? It takes hot but just a little, i think in a stepper motor is normal..

Thanks
 
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Bionic-Badger

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Hard drives don't use stepper motors. They'd be too slow for any kind of disk access. Maybe you're thinking of a brushless motor? Some floppy disk drives use stepper motors, however, as do CDROM drives.
 
S

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But my hard drive HAS stepper motor, i'm sure.. Why? Some reasons:
*Has 4 cables
*I opened it and i can see that has coils of stepper motors
*If i connect 2, 3 or 4 cables to 4.5VDC, it doesnt spins, just moves to another position
*Connecting different cables and changing the polarity, it moves from a position to another one, like step by step..

'any kind of disk access'... No, no, i dont mean the voice coil... Yes, it has actuator by voice coil, but it has stepper motor too, the one that spins the disks

Thanks
 
Toke

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In trade school there were this small toy crane turned by a stepper motor.
I set up a PLC with 8 relay outputs to turn it back and forth between 2 different positions. :D

I do not quite recall how, but think it involved two sets of two wires that required alternate activation with reverse polarity for reverse turning.

If you want to take full advantage of a stepper motor and it´s abilities you will need some kind of controller anyway, so why not buy a small PLC?
Alternately you could look around for a ready-made stepmotor controller.
 
S

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Thanks, but i don't want to shop parts, i'm trying to get a nice laser by the cheapest way..
So, the solution I posted works perfectly, but I want an opinion: I'm correct with the actual setup? I quote:
The motor has 4 cables, so I tried connecting one coil (two cables) to the sound and the other coil (the other 2 cables) to a 4.5DC source.. With this configuration it works
so nice, better than the voice coil actuator, but, I am right? It takes hot but just a little, i think in a stepper motor is normal..
Click to expand...
 
Toke

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That does not sound like a step motor.
And I have still not figured out what you mean by voice coil.
 
S

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Why does not sound like stepper motor?

And the voice coil is the one that controls the hard drive arm.
 
Toke

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You lost me there, now I have no idea of what you have in hand.
I recommend you read up on step motors on e.g. Wiki.
 
S

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Dude, i know what is a stepper motor :p
Ok, forget everything... I just have a stepper motor, but, the config I mentioned is correct with a stepper?
 
S

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But i don't want it to spin, i want it to move a little and return to the position at the music rythm
 
blrock

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You can control the 1.8 degree stepper motor from old floppy drives simply using the parallel port and C programming language. In 2000 my first laser system I built used one stepper motor. Although it was only a x-axis it still did some amazing things. I still have the software I wrote somewhere. You could press keys on the keyboard and the stepper would do different movements. These movements could be changed in the program.

It was a great project. Of coarse I was only interested in controller a laser beam but the stepper had so many other uses once you can control it.

This was the website I followed:
http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/diskstepper.html
 
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