To make a CNC machine, you need to use stepper motors. Floppy drives have them, we can use them :D This is an easy way for you to get a basic understanding of how stepper motors work. In this video we prepare a floppy drive for use in our MINI CNC machine, and explain how the pins are interfaced to make the stepper motor move. In the next video we make a printer port interface that we can then use to trigger the floppy drive pins.

Notes: Not all Floppies CDRoms are created equally, for this project we are going to interface with bipolar stepper motors found commonly inside of CDRoms and floppy drives but some CDRoms have rotary encoders and plain dc motors (they have 1 red and one black wire) we are looking for CDRoms with stepper motors. Also optimally we would use the same floppy drive make and brand so the controller assembly would look cooler (optional).