Another DIY Hobby Winder

[jbforrer]

Greetings,

Here's another idea for a pickup winder. Made from recycled floppy disk parts -- please see attached picture.

After playing around with small stepper motors for use in my winder and finding how hot they got after a while, also not quite being successful at getting good speeds/torque, was looking for something else. Then found this old floppy disk drive in my spares box --- the older 360K/1.2Meg variety. Neat thing I thought was, it has a decent brushless motor and in addition useful stepper-driven linear transport parts.

The challenge was to find a way to vary the motor speed. After a bit of prodding, it now spins from quite slow to about 2000 RPM. The linear transport was jigged to do the auto spooling function. To control all this, I made up a little A PIC-driven controller board for implementing a simple user interface and added a LiniStepper controller to drive the auto spooler.

My firmware allows setup of the spooler for different style bobbins, the actual spooling pattern (linear/scatter), and keeps tally of actual/desired turns count. Of course, the spooler is in lock-step with the motor. The motor has plenty of torque, enough to easily break #40 wire.

The test pickups made with the winder sounds OK to me, machine wound or not. I did, however, install a wire guide for doing occasional hand-guided winds.

Trust this is of interest to other DIY'ers.

Regards.

JBF.

[David Schwab]

That looks pretty cool. Nice work.

From what I understand your stepper motors were running hot because of the way you were driving them.

There is a couple of threads here on a DIY CNC winder that uses stepper motors, and this was discussed.

[David King]

JB,
That's very cool. I'd like to know more about how you get the spindle going and control the speed in step with the traverse. I have access to unlimited supplies of free floppy drives so this might be a cool project for schools on a budget etc.
There are a lot of small motorized gizmos that might benefit from the limitless supplies of printers and computers that get tossed every second. It boggles the mind how much potentially useful shit we throw away for not thinking.

[jbforrer]

David,

The sync pulses are generated by an opto interrupter salvaged from the floppy. I glued a small copper strip to the edge of the spindle. These pulses are fed into the PIC's interrupt pin. The interrupt handler emits STEP/DIR pulses also keeps track of the turns counter.

Motor assembly differs a lot between drives. The assembly is integrated into a PCB that can be removed as a working unit from the drive. It runs off 12V. Locate two trim pots on the PCB --- those allow fine speed adjustments and might be a good place to start your own speed control. Mine is an older drive with mostly discrete parts. My speed control consists of a pot and capacitor that changes the master clock RC timing.

Thanks for the interest, hope this helps.

JBF.

[David King]

Thanks for that, you make it sound pretty intuitive.
BTW, What part of the state do you reside in?

[jbforrer]

David, I live in the mid valley, between Corvallis and Eugene.
JBF.

[RedHouse]

Very cool.

The more PIC's the merryer!