Floppy drive stepper motor scanning system

[MarioMaster]

thanks for the comments everyone, although in terms of a real laser show system - this is pretty much junk it was sort of a proof-of-concept for myself to see if i could make a system capable of text without spending a ton of money. I'm going to try for beamshows next time and see how it handles that.

 

[the_stark]

Does anyone know any CNC stuff here? Because many small CNC milling machine setups use stepper motors to control them, and work from the PC's parallel port, ironically enough. You just find the pinout for the floppy drives, and make a connector out of a parallel port that plugs into the computer, attaching the correct pins to the corresponding ones on the connector..... a bit complicated to explain but easier done than said.

There are a few programs out there (free) that can control steppers, and I'll bet with a bit of work you could set it up to control these steppers.... Then to display an image with this scanner all that needs to be done is take a picture on your computer you want to display, send it to the CNC program and off you go!

Now there's probably some really big problem with this idea I don't know about, but just some speculation, of course. If I come across some floppy drives I'll try it and see what happens

 

[JECS]

yeah i was thinking something like that. using an xy plotter table. it will be pretty much the exact setup a person would need. if i had an income oh the things i would do...