I am looking at using a bare hard drive motor for some Halloween projects. I was wondering what would be needed to get one to spin up and control rpm. I did some quick searches, but did not see any existing threads. It may end up being more complex and costly than buying an out of box solution, but had to ask.

Thanks,

 

they use brush-less DC (BLDC) motors.

The ICs that control the motor are on the board, of course. The minimum RPM is around 5,200; 5,700 is typical, some go to 11,000RPM (server drives).

They're kind of like a 3-phase stepper motor.

 

and, most have the coils fabbed into the board itself. Your best approach is to use the whole board with motor from a harddrive, then manipulate the motor controller.

 

Or create one. You could snag the motor controller from an older CDROM motor they tend to use discrete IC's that are manageable. The motors are the same type I believe.

 

The REALLY old CD-ROM drives were 1x, 2x, 4x.

When I bought my Gateway 486dx2-66 back in '93, a single speed Sony CD-ROM was $200; the 2x CD-ROM was another $600. I got the RAM maxed out at 16MB for an extra $300. A few months later, a tsunami hit Japan, wiping out some semiconductor plants, and the price of RAM doubled. I was glad to have gotten such a deal when I did.

 

Jeesh, don't date yourself like that!
You can get blueray drives now for 50 bucks.
I do remember that ram shortage though, luckily I wasn't in the market at that time =)

 

...I was... And I paid $30 a meg. Not --TOO-- bad considering what it got up to.

I remember prices around $50 a meg.. Now, you would be hard pressed to find a place to sell it to you for 50 a gig.

Kingston has:
3GB 2000MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 DIMM (Kit of 3) XMP
for $139. That is nuts.

I had a Commodore PC10-2 (IBM-clone) with dual 360k 5.25" floppy drives.

I had to save for 2 years to get a 32MB hard drive.

I remember the LTkernel HDDs for the C64/128 were $1000 for 10MB.

 

Ahh, but did you have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get it?

 

Ahh, but did you have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get it?

Ah-hem...And what if I did?