Floppy disks and floppy drives.

 comp.robotics.misc    Post an article   get this group's latest topics as an RSS feed add this group's latest topics to your My MSN content add this group's latest topics to your My Yahoo content
Subject Author Date
Floppy disks and floppy drives. Trail Rat 02-17-2008
Posted by Trail Rat on February 17, 2008, 4:26 pm
Please log in for more thread options
Sorting through some old boxes of stuff that has been screaming out to
be sorted. I find a couple dozen floppy drives and literally hundreds
of floppy disks (which I'm currently processing).

Was curious to know if they still had a place in this day 'n' age of
micro storage cards and dvd+rws.

Would love to know if I could do anything with them apart from
stripping the drives for their motors.

TR

Posted by Guy Macon on February 18, 2008, 12:48 am
Please log in for more thread options



Trail Rat wrote:
>
>Sorting through some old boxes of stuff that has been screaming out to
>be sorted. I find a couple dozen floppy drives and literally hundreds
>of floppy disks (which I'm currently processing).
>
>Was curious to know if they still had a place in this day 'n' age of
>micro storage cards and dvd+rws.
>
>Would love to know if I could do anything with them apart from
>stripping the drives for their motors.

I can do better than just answering your question; I can tell
you how to answer it and all future questions like it.

Go to eBay, and search on floppy disks / floppy disk drives.
Click the box to show completed listings only. If every
auction has many bids and the final price is high, the
item is valuable. If many auctions end with no bids and the
ones that do have low final prices, it has no worth on the
market. It also means that you can dump the ones you have,
knowing that if you ever have a need for one it will be easy
and cheap to get.



--
misc.business.product-dev: a Usenet newsgroup
about the Business of Product Development.

-- Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/>


Posted by Brendan Gillatt on February 18, 2008, 2:09 pm
Please log in for more thread options
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Trail Rat wrote:
> Sorting through some old boxes of stuff that has been screaming out to
> be sorted. I find a couple dozen floppy drives and literally hundreds
> of floppy disks (which I'm currently processing).
>
> Was curious to know if they still had a place in this day 'n' age of
> micro storage cards and dvd+rws.
>
> Would love to know if I could do anything with them apart from
> stripping the drives for their motors.
>
> TR

I can only think of one use for a floppy drive now: as a boot medium;
even that's getting less common with USB booting.

It would be an interesting project to see if you could read/write to them
using a micro - the data rate is fabulously slow making it easy to get
the timing right.

By the way, if yours are anything like the last one I took apart you
don't get nice stepper motors out of them - you get a horrid, flat
pancake style motor with the coils etched onto a circuit board and a
circular magnet above it.


- --
Brendan Gillatt | GPG Key: 0xBF6A0D94
brendan brendangillatt (dot) co (dot) uk
http://www.brendangillatt.co.uk
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFHudfruv4tpb9qDZQRAnyDAKCgggk71SXuqdPmaLE9eEXEsteAVQCcDi1l
zKwTnjqi8HWRyx/6+ZRbsAY=
=yuhh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Similar ThreadsPosted
Re: why will you compensate the acceptable eastern disks before Edna does November 10, 2007, 12:48 pm
alhadin, in short disks heavy and random, changes at all it, enquiring separately December 29, 2007, 12:48 pm
electric scooter drives & wheels for robot ? May 12, 2006, 7:38 pm
WANTED: Digital brushless servo drives October 23, 2006, 3:58 pm
all arab marvellous drives will suspiciously tackle the prisons November 17, 2007, 1:20 am
Re: Pies lose TAC sponsorship after a rookie drink drives January 14, 2008, 9:09 pm
Little by little, Ayaz never travels until Ghassan drives the detailed avenue selfishly. November 27, 2007, 4:58 am

The site map in XML format XML site map
other useful resources:
Official Robosapien Website
Lego Mindstorms Website

Contact Us | Privacy Policy