Addictronics

Floppy Drive Camera | October 2006

Uses a floppy drive R/W head to pan camera. Eventually this will be controllable and viewable from this web site.

Here is what a floppy drive looks with its shell off.

Here you can see the stepper motor that will rotate the camera. It is normally used to move the read/write head back and forth on the disk.

On the left you can see the back of the stepper motor and on the right is the ide cable port.

After tracing leads on the pcb board I figured that I could cut the majority of it off. After I chopped it i decided to work on the metal case also.

Here you can see what is left of the circuit board. I am using the metal case as the mount for the camera.

I added another bent piece of metal to make a hinge. The left piece is what the camera will be attached to and an arm will go to the read/write head to rotate the camera left and right.

Another angle of the hinge design.

Here is the circuit design to control the stepper motor. The computer will control the camera through its printer port. On the right is a spliced printer cable.

The usb webcam is taped to the metal hinge and a piece of coat hanger wire is used to push and pull on the side of the hinge causing it to turn.

The controller program was written in VB and connects via socket connection to this website. Eventually there will be a page dedicated to this webcam and the movement of it.

Video