Computer Hard Drive Stepper Motor Experiment -Slow Motion

Just a goofy, geeky experiment making a computer hard drive's 4-wire stepper motor running on straight DC voltage. Essentially, this is a 3 pole dc motor at this point. One can split each wire, and add more "poles" to increase the speed or add many more "communtator" trigger points. We are using one trigger point. This is a very crude way of controlling the stepper motor.
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Stepper motors normally require a controller to fire the individual poles in the proper timing to make it spin.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• hard
• drive
• homopolar
• tripolar
• maxtor
• brushless
• dc
• motor
• experiment
• amazing
• casio
• ex
• f1
• pro

[thedothedew]

So many fingerprints on the platter, for shame ._.

7200rpm drive?

[taofledermaus]

Haha, I hope I can recover all that data on there still!

I think it was a 7200rpm/ 40gb drive. This was only turning around 500rpm tops. The motor controller in the HD is needed to get it up to high speed working like a speed controller on a brushless RC car/airplane motor.

[ryukenosuke]

...you did this to a working HDD? I, too, hope you're able to recover the data on there. Hahaha

[taofledermaus]

The HD was old, and was causing some computer problems, plus it was only 40gb, so it was yanked out of a computer and replaced with a higher capacity one.

[kuza261]

i lust took apart my old 40 gigg full of photos and im cewing it right now

[xniquilador]

I am sure that music is from a King's Quest soundtrack... =)

[neato3000]

Ha ha WOW I can't believe you got that to work like that. Id've gotten so frustrated trying to get the wires to sit right that i would have thrown it.

[NickBlackDIN]

you used the wires as "switches" wouldn't it be neater if you put a plate closer to the disk and use brushes?

iether way, good job.. evens if it is a bit sloppy..

btw, may I ask what kind of camera you used to get it that smppth on slow-mo?

[cwjolly69]

to late for that lol