"Hacking" a Floppy Disk Eject Motor

A fair number of BEAMbots use a surplus Macintosh computer floppy eject motor (in particular, the eject motor from Sony-manufactured Mac floppy drives) as a gear motor.

These motors have a lot going for them -- they are strong, efficient, and (at least for the time being) easily available at swap meets and on auction sites for just a few dollars. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how, starting with a surplus floppy drive, to yield a motor ready for installation in your robot. I did not make this tutorial, but I did get permission to make it into an instructable!

Step 1 Step 1: Get a floppy drive, and "uncase" it

First off, you need to find a floppy drive for an Apple Macintosh computer (you can still find these, although they'll be getting scarce soon since floppy drives are no longer being made).

Mac floppy drives start out in a 4-sided case. You'll need to unscrew 4 Phillips-head screws (2 on each "edge" of the case), then pry the drive guts out of the sheet-metal case. I have yet to find a use for the casing, so I just throw it away.

This picture shows the "interesting" face of a cased floppy drive; the eject motor is on the back face of the circuit board.

Comments

[frostybob]

You guys might not be the people to ask but when you open a floppy drive theres a smallish motor that moves the reader thing. It uses a cork screw. Is that a stepper motor? What is it?

[MrJentis]

Yes. This motor makes a precise number of stepped revolutions to move the read/write head assembly to the proper track position. The read/write head assembly is fastened to the stepper motor shaft. It's the small cylinder you see normally located at the back of the drive.

[erikals]

can you turn this into a floppy gun? (something that fires floppy disks at least 5-10 ft)
That I'd like to see

[Walikai]

is it this hard just to get a motor these days? have to ruin a perfectly good floppy drive(supposedly)