Electricity With Stepper Motors

From reuk.co.uk or TheBackShed.com
small stepper motors can be perfect for the job. Found in old computer printers (dot matrix, daisy wheel, and some laser), stepper motors are cheaply (if not freely) available and generate AC power at low rates of rotation (far lower than similarly sized DC motors for example). Therefore small wind turbine blades can be mounted directly onto the motor shaft rather than through a noisy and complicated gearing mechanism. Small stepper motors (i.e. under 1 inch diameter) are only really useful for powering a couple of LEDs, larger motors can be used to recharge batteries and much more. Detail...
See Also..

• PVC Wind Turbine Blades Form reuk.co.uk
• Stepper Motor Basics. Form reuk.co.uk
• Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States Link...
  
• Wind Energy Resource Altas South East Asiaresource data on wind speed
• Pringles Wind Turbine From instructables.com
• Wind Turbine FAQ From rpc.com.au
  

Floppy Drive Pan WebCam

Making an web-controlled webcam panning unit out of an old 3,5" floppy drive, old CD-box, a paperclip, two nails, a rubber band and about 2 Euro worth of electrical components

Milan Gajic has made a cool Web controlled floppy drive powered pan cam. Some simple right and left commands on this page allow anyone on the net to have the floppy drive move the camera around to get look out of Milan’s window.

See also...

• How Floppy Disk Drives Work by Gary Brown From HowStuffwork *****
• Anatomy of a Floppy Disk Drive From From hardwaresecrets.com *****
• Floppy drive stepper motor by ashishrd
• Controlling Floppy Drive Stepper Motor via Parallel Port By Ashish Derhgawen. From CodeProject
• "Floppy" the Robot by E. Teevan and J. Herbert
• Floppy drive RC car - by Eliot Phillips
• Converting a Floppy Disk Drive into a Simple Robot II and I by Chris Barron
• How to use disk drive stepper-motors by Tomi Engdahl
• Electricity with Stepper Motors From reuk.co.uk
• SunFlopper , The dirt-cheap floppy-drive active solar tracking unit by Brian S. Julin