To make a CNC machine, you need to use stepper motors. Floppy drives have them, we can use them :D This is an easy way for you to get a basic understanding of how stepper motors work. In this video we prepare a floppy drive for use in our MINI CNC machine, and explain how the pins are interfaced to make the stepper motor move. In the next video we make a printer port interface that we can then use to trigger the floppy drive pins.
Notes: Not all Floppies CD-Roms are created equally, for this project we are going to interface with bi-polar stepper motors found commonly inside of CD-Roms and floppy drives but some CD-Roms have rotary encoders and plain dc motors (they have 1 red and one black wire) we are looking for CD-Roms with stepper motors. Also optimally we would use the same floppy drive make and brand so the controller assembly would look cooler (optional).
