Stepper motor controller with Parallel/serial port interface

Find an old floppy disk drive. The steppers that position the heads have a simple interface that can be controlled by a few bits on the parallel port. This assumes that you will be using the floppy head steppers themselves. They are not super-high torque or anything, but I built a little robot platform (on a long tether for power and control from the PC) that used two 360K floppy controllers and motors. mounted on the sides of a cut-down floppy chassis with an added

3rd-wheel caster. My 10-yr old nephew enjoyed using a little BASIC brogram to steer it around the floor.

Don't recall at the moment which Website had the connection info, but if you Google on "floppy stepper" you'll probably find it.

Best regards,

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

hi puneet i m also looking for the same if u find any information regarding the same please forward it to my mail. many thanks in advance.

kind regards sunil kumar

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2 bipolar stepper motors can be controlled from the parallel port fairly easily, the parallel port doesn't have enough power to drive the motors directly (depending on your mobo and motor specs but generally not) so you'll need to pick up a motor driver, a quad half H bridge works well for bipolar. When I did it I used 2 SN754410NE from TI (available in small quantities from digikey for $1.88US) to drive 2 stepper motors directly from the pc. Software for it is more work than the hardware, you'll be doing the stepping manually driving each bit in correct order, it's not difficult and can be done in simple scripts but integrating into your application can be a pain. Datasheet is available on digikey's site and would suggest you read it before laying out your system but basically you tie the 4 Y pins to the 4 motor leads and the 4 A pins to output on your parallel port (pins 2-10) supply appropriate power and ground and you're ready to go. Let us know how it goes for you.

-john

Look at the various kits available from