floppy drive steppers

I know that floppy drive steppers compared to the recommended commercial ones have less torque by several orders of magnitude... but I have so far already successfully used one to power a simple motion control rig for filming model shots. So I feel that, with appropriate gearing, they should be up to the task of powering a rep-rap, albeit a fairly slow one.

Also, the boards already attached to them enable the control of the stepper with only two pins (step & direction, the earth is via the power cable), which can be wired directly to a parallel port. This allows 4 of these steppers to be controlled directly thorough software (I used a bash script and parashell for my motion controller), enabling a simple rep-rap to be built using stuff you can find from a skip, without the need for any other external electronics.

Does this seem at all realistic to people?

I'm gonna try it anyway, hopefully I'll have a rep-strap up and running from skipped parts pretty soon.

Sounds good to me! Good luck!

got the floppy drives... am now looking for a repeatable source of cogs to mesh with the worm on the floppys - the one I used in the piccy was from a model shop that I am currently nowhere near... besides, I would prefer to use non-bought parts for this little project, I am also sourcing bought parts for a more conventional repStrap.

Try this lot. I've found them very useful in the past.

[www.robotobjects.com]

They also have a lot of gears and gearing that isn't in their catalog. A talk with their tech guy can be very useful.

cool link... ty however for the junk based machine, I'm trying to be strict and only used stuff that is available from skips.. I might go rip open some old VCRs maybe.. I am considering it a sort of semi art project that I hope will be functional as well but will still be fun if it doesn't go according to plan.

Ordering fat steppers for my 'real' repStrap..

"I am considering it a sort of semi art project that I hope will be functional as well but will still be fun if it doesn't go according to plan. "

That's the spirit!

"
Ordering fat steppers for my 'real' repStrap.."

That's odd. I'm headed in the opposite direction with my Tommelise 2.0 repstrap.

[www.3dreplicators.com]

Of course, I'm using threaded drive rods, so the threaded rod multiplies the sparse torque this sort of stepper produces.

that looks almost as small as the ones in these floppy drives

the reason I'm looking at fat steppers for my main machine is cos I want the ability to do light milling as well as fdm work..

LOL! Enjoy the electric bill.

seeing the steppers you are using makes me think that I'm not being as ridiculous as I first thought tho... and the benefits of being able to contol them directly from a parallel port with two wires per floppy controller and nothing else are huge in interfacing terms.

for my next trick I was going to port the x3d parser I've written in flash/haXe into a bash script and then try to write some more script for calculating a tool path from that 3d data before sending the floppy steppers on their merry way by referencing parashell from the same script.

so then I can draw stuff up in blender, export direct to x3d and then run my script to print.

no micro controllers, no external electronics to build at all in fact and no stl files.. easy