Hi,
Is there a simple way to re-use the motors from old hard drives... I assume that they are some sort of DC / 3phase pulsed motor, but has anyone had any luck driving them external to a drive.
They are easy to salvage, and I was hoping to be able to use some.
Cheers!
Mike
assume
any
People used to try rewinding CD ROM drive motors in model planes. It became so popular that people started supplied kits...
became
Yup - I'm aware of that - its the hard disk drive spindle motors I'm interested in...
Mike
"This windmill uses a small stepper motor from a computer floppy drive to charge nicad batteries."
If you just want it to go around (not worried about getting much torque or speed etc.) then you could treat the hard drive spindle motor like a very low resolution stepper motor - you just need to supply the motor with low voltage 3-phase AC. It could be a set of square waves generated in a PIC, or sine waves from a 3-phase R-C oscillator, but either way some kind of buffer will be needed - e.g. for the square waves a MOSFET bridge (or for a cheap bodge, a huge number of 74AC series logic gates in parallel), or if you're not worried about efficiency and you want nice smooth rotation, you could even use a three phase sine wave oscillator and buffer it with three audio amplifiers, e.g. the very cheap TDA2030.
If you want it to go fast, then you need a proper brushless motor controller which you should be able to find on the net (e.g. the app. notes of several microcontroller manufacturers).
Chris
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