How to Use the Stepper Motors of CD/DVD/FDD Drives

Step By step
Author: Rakesh Mondal

Generally stepper motor's are costly as compared to a normal DC motor. Stepper Motor is probably the first thing you need to know about, if you are interested to learn robotics.(the next one would be Servo Motors). In India the stepper motor may cost from 250 to 500 rupees,(6$-10$) so to reduce the cost you can use a stepper motor from waste floppy drives or CD-DVD drives.

The stepper motor used for running the disk in the fdd are generally hybrid stepper motor. In case you want to know what is stepper motor can you can read in Wikipedia , it has detailed description about Hybrid Stepper Motor.

Here I will teach you how to use a stepper motor from Floppy or CD-DVD Drive and identify the motor wires without a multimeter. A part of a project in my high school made me to do some research on CD / DVD Stepper motors about the identification of the stepper motor wires in a Floppy Drive or a DVD drive But I couldn't ’t find anything relevant, so I had to go through some research work to make it possible. After a whole days I came with understanding of the labeling of the stepper motor. so here is a simple explanation of Stepper motor wire labeling of a Typical DVD or a Floppy drive.

FDD- Floppy Drive Stepper Motor

The stepper motor used in the Floppy Drive are generally hybrid stepper motor. It is used for rotating the FDD disk in clock-wire or anticlockwise direction. The steps given below shows how to identify the wires of the stepper motor , in the end you will also find a picture tutorial,explaining every step.

STEPS

• Carefully remove the covering of the floppy drive.
• Find the central motor (the flat big circular disc)
• De solder the wire connected to the stepper motor carefully with a soldering iron.
• Search for the wires labeling U,V,W,COMM,these are the four wires for the controlling.

The comm wire states common terminal, rest the sequence of the wire goes as U V W. The arrangement of the wire may be ordered irregular, don’t confuse with that, the ordering will always be u v w.

CD/DVD Stepper Motor labeling

While experimenting with many DVD drive stepper motors and I found the labeling of DVD drive stepper motor to be same as that of a floppy drive. The stepper motor in DVD/CD drive are exactly same as that of the floppy drive. The only difference is that they are not hybrid stepper motor. The stepper motor in the DVD drive are standard 4- wire stepper motor.

Get some old DVD drive from vendor and after dismantling it you can get a good lens that can be used for some laser gun melting some balloon, a DC motor and two stepper motor's .One small stepper motor for panning of the drive tray and another one for running the disk.

Both stepper motor inside the DVD are 4 –wire stepper. Labeling same as that of a FDD,[one comm and rest as U ,V , W]

PICTURE TUTORIAL FOR Floppy drive and CD/DVD Drive STEPPER MOTOR

- Remove case and turn back , unscrew the motor

- Remove the stepper motor.

- Remove the wire using a soldering iron.

- Use a magnifier. Check out for the labeling , U,  V,  W,  COMM after removing the wires.

- After the identification is over you can attach some wire to the labeling for further easy handling and wiring to the board.

- The stepper motor can be then run in several ways, you can get some cheap kits or boards from store for running or you can use your computer for running it from either an usb or parallel port. You can also use USB INTERFACE BOARD for running the stepper motor.

- MY Demo board which i have explained here, can be used as well to run stepper motors.

Thanks for reading
Rakesh Mondal

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