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While walking home from the bus stop yesterday I encountered an HP
printer that someone had thrown away. Naturally I snagged that puppy!
I've been thinking about using the stepper motors out of it for
remote tuning drive for loop capacitors.

Have any of you folks tried steppers from old printers? Anything
special I should look out for?

73,

'Bear' NH7SR

--- qrpbear <qrpbear@...> wrote:

While walking home from the bus stop yesterday I encountered an
HP
printer that someone had thrown away. Naturally I snagged that
puppy!
I've been thinking about using the stepper motors out of it for
remote tuning drive for loop capacitors.

Have any of you folks tried steppers from old printers? Anything
special I should look out for?

There is a stepper motor driver list, but it's rather dead and
starting to get taken over by spammers.

You might also try the Electronics_101 list, it is very active.



I don't think you will be happy with the stepper connected directly
to the tuning cap. It's probably 200 steps per rev, or 1.8 degrees
per step. Half stepping won't do you any good unless you intend on
leaving the stepper powered up all the time.

So you'll want to try and use the gears. Scanners and dot matrix
printers are another source of already geared-down steppers. In
fact, some scanners use a stiff string to move the scanning head,
so you could perhaps use it with a tuning cap taken from an old
dial radio.

=====
Steve Greenfield // Digital photography, scanning,
Polymorph Digital Photography // retouching, and photomorphing
253-318-2473 voice // to your specs.
polymorph@... //
// Based in Tacoma, WA, USA




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Steve,

I got the motors out this morning. Two 7.5 degree steppers and one
conventional motor (rpm??). I was thinking more along the lines of
coupling through two 6:1 epicyclic ball drives to the capacitor. That
should give me about 0.21 degrees per step. Might be fine enough for
government work. I'll still have to build a controller of course.

I'll check out the Electronics 101 group.

73,

'Bear' NH7SR

--- In loopantennas@..., Steve Greenfield
<alienrelics@y...> wrote:

--- qrpbear <qrpbear@y...> wrote:

While walking home from the bus stop yesterday I encountered an
HP
printer that someone had thrown away. Naturally I snagged that
puppy!
I've been thinking about using the stepper motors out of it for
remote tuning drive for loop capacitors.

Have any of you folks tried steppers from old printers? Anything
special I should look out for?

There is a stepper motor driver list, but it's rather dead and
starting to get taken over by spammers.

You might also try the Electronics_101 list, it is very active.



I don't think you will be happy with the stepper connected directly
to the tuning cap. It's probably 200 steps per rev, or 1.8 degrees
per step. Half stepping won't do you any good unless you intend on
leaving the stepper powered up all the time.

So you'll want to try and use the gears. Scanners and dot matrix
printers are another source of already geared-down steppers. In
fact, some scanners use a stiff string to move the scanning head,
so you could perhaps use it with a tuning cap taken from an old
dial radio.

=====
Steve Greenfield // Digital photography, scanning,
Polymorph Digital Photography // retouching, and photomorphing
253-318-2473 voice // to your specs.
polymorph@p... //
// Based in Tacoma, WA, USA




__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.