Floppy Drive RC Car

floppy

Most people don’t use their floppy drive anymore so you might as well make a car out of it, right? If you short two sets of pins in the drive connector, the motor will spin freely when 5V is applied. This motor is used to drive the rear axle. The front wheel is steered using the read/write head’s stepper motor. An NE555 timer is used to pulse the motor when the steering buttons are pushed. This design is really simple and has a tethered control, but it is a good starting point if you want to try something else.

[thanks Boff]

30 thoughts on “Floppy Drive RC Car

  1. It would be pretty sweet if you could work in an “overdrive” system, like have a 9v battery along with the 1.5v series, and a relay to switch to 9v, and then back to 1.5 – the downside to using boost all the time would be that It would eventually probably fry your car.

    Just a thought.

  2. ok i’ve been out for a couple of days, so now that HaD is an indie (i think thats how its put) can you lost the “beta” I don’t think you beta anymore.

    But now that i think about it, i guess everything you do, is well beta work

    0h y35 1 f0r607, h3h3, 70 u53 7h3 |337.

  3. “Hack-A-Day’s beta status just makes it that much more a hacker’s site. Leave the beta.”

    I don’t understand the reasoning behind that but it doesn’t really bother me either way. I guess it’s always in “beta” because it’s never really finished.

    Funny project, definitely takes some creativity to think of this.

  4. How weird is this: Just three days ago I was looking at my bookmark list and saw the link to ‘build a robot out of a floppy drive’. I thought “Hey, I have a floppy drive! I can build a robot”. But the link turned out to be dead. So I figured my drive was just going to have to live out it’s life as a drive and not a robot. But then I see this, goodbye Mr. floppy drive!

  5. i started on this, and i can’t get the second motor to spin. i got the main one, but after trying touching the ground wire to pin 20, nothing happened. perhaps some help… the page is from 4 years ago so i doubt the guy that wrote it is still around to help…

  6. Recently I’m also doing project with a 1.44MB floppy drive, but everytime I turn plug in the power the stepper motor would spin to track 00. beside that, I observe there’s somekind of protection which turn off the stepper motor whenever I tries to put some load on it. Does anybody know how to disable this and make it turn as I wish?

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