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]
whoa what a great idea seeing as floppy drives are not liked by XP anymore!! gonna go and do this and see how well it goes
FIRST POST!!!
Now ‘this’ is hacking.
Really really cool!
Transplant some cheapie RC board on this and you are tetherless!!
We gotta race em! A whole league!
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.
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.
Hack-A-Day’s beta status just makes it that much more a hacker’s site. Leave the beta.
“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.
I hate spamming the comments like this, but the PSU hackaday meeting is tonight in the HUB. It starts at 8:00pm and if you cant be there watch use here: http://www.psu.edu/ur/cam.html and talk to us via irc (#hackaday on EFNET)
i remember seeing this along time ago. about 2 years. so its kinda old. but its still cool.
Wow,
Bets hack ever. Hardcore.
BTW #4 its 73h |337
haha
We used to make these in our electronics class years ago. They are neat little bots that go pretty fast. If you want to check out what we’ve been up to this year check out our site
http://www.sullivanheights.com/
thats us on the main page!
Well for once I won’t be on the irc but i can hold up paper to tjhe web cam if you wnat me to.
Freakin’ Sweet!!!! Gonna make me two of those and race ’em!
Freakin’ Sweet!!!! Gonna make me two of those and race ’em!
cool, I’m making one for sure.
I wonder what you would have to do for something similar to work with a CD-ROM drive, the floppy motor doestn spin that fast.
I attempted to use a cd rom drive. I managed to get the motor to spin, but it has no torque.
Looks like it got way too many visitors :)
why not make a hack a day login instead? so you only have to verify once
that is your email, then you could just use a password
What about thursday Nano Hacks? I was looking forward to that.
Not too long ago, I removed the floppy drive from my PC. Never really used it, and I got rid of that cable taking up space inside the box. Starting to look like the end of an era…
what’s a floppy drive? is that like an 8-track or something?
That is brilliant
Suprised most of you haven’t seen this before, I’ve known of floppy projects like this for a few years now.
oh i’ve seen it before, thsi is jsu thte most in-depth one yet. so how did you get teh CD drive ot spin up? i’m really curious.
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!
Long time ago we also did something similar:
(spanish text)
http://www.sorgonet.com/trashing/madmaxfloppy/
It’s funny. Try it!
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…
can some1 explain to me step by step how to do this?
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?
thanks for this info taken ages to find this.