[Konstantin]

Hi all again.
You know I kind of feeling lonely here. I post and I post and ppl just read the post and sez nothing, at least drop a few lines like "Keep it up" or "Hi there, I dont know nothing about the subject, keep trying". Lend me a shoulder here please *snif* *snif*

Ok back to the topic.

While I am learning about steppers and I have aquired a small amout of old junk computer hardware and lately been using floppy disk drive parts to drive the stepper that was in the drive. It was a 5 1/4 old floppy drive with the electronics and the stepper in good shape.
Since I have no regular driver board yet and I have some salvaged steppers from disk drives and printers I dicided to experiment using its own floppy's stepper driver.

So using the information from this sites ...

Pinouts : http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/tm100/
Program : http://jewel.morgan.edu/~tmalone/dskdrv/dskdrv.html

... and a bit of tweaking I found that my particular floppy drive uses pin 12 to select the head stepper , pin 16 to power the stepper , pin 18 as direction and pin 20 to step.
So I hooked up the driver board to my LPT using
LPT pin 2 to driver board 20 step
LPT pin 3 to driver board 18 direction
LPT pin 20 to driver board GND

The floppy driver turns the stepper to 'home' position on boot up and I am yet to figure out how to remove that feature, there are lots of jumpers on the driver board tho I cant tell what they do.


So far I have only found those small programs written in C (link above) and tried to run them with mixed success. The last program named DSKDRV3 works for me partially. The first part of the program suppose to turn the stepper clockwise and it just vibrates without moving, then the pause and after it do turns clockwise while it suppose to run CCW.

I dont remember much about programming but can compile the program on Turbo C 2.

Anybody used floppy drive steppers?