[patriciooholegu]

That´s it.
If you check this page you will find the way to connect a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive to the parallel port of your computer. They sugest the use of some software builded on Visual C.
After to find a few of this drives for free in a pc store, i made the conections like they say and... It WORK!!!
But after that i try to controll the proyect with Kcam software...AND IT WORK ALSO!!!
You may be smiling because of my stupid join, but in my country a controller card cost more than 2 months of salary, and finding this for my project (A home made VERY SMALL lathe) FOR FREE was the best in the last months, since a have tray to do my lathe without spending almost any money.
the floppy disk drive´s i have show 2 kind of steppers: Rounded unipolar steppers, or boxed bipolar. The ones i like are the bipolars for my project.
they are small, but powerfull in of for little machines.
Anyway...they are free, or almost!!!!

[patriciooholegu]

Ups!!!
The page is this:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/floppystepper.aspx

In that page they use 3 1/2 floppy drive, but works just fine on the bigger ones of 5 1/4.

[johnmac]

Worth a try. The 5 1/4 should have more power. The older the better. Floppy drives from old XT's (8088) had some rather large steppers. I would think they would be easier to work with than the tiny 3 1/2 drives.

John

[patriciooholegu]

It Worth the try!!!
you need no more than half hour to make the connections, after undestanding the tutorial (By the way, very well explained).