Apple Floppies

[sammy1am]

Apple Floppies

[Lothean]

Hello
As far as I know, Apple drives are not compatible with Moppy, sorry
You could still try to do some reverse engineering and create a Moppy instrument for them

[Sammy1Am]

Any chance you could share the pinouts/diagrams here? From my little research it seems like they definitely don't have the same super-convenient step/direction pins that the rest of floppies have, but it doesn't mean there's not some way around it.

(But out of the box, @Lothean 's right, probably not going to work)

[DJthefirst]

http://old.pinouts.ru/HD/MacExtDrive_pinout.shtml
Here is the link for the page I found it on

[DJthefirst]

If you want me to modify the drive inside I can I have a 5” a 3.5” and another 5” mit drive but that has normal pin outs I’d send pics but I don’t think I can from my phone.

[Sammy1Am]

That's a better pinout than I'd found, but confirms my suspicions: rather than controlling the steps and direction with pins, the control line(s) are used to send commands and the drive handles the steps and direction on its own. I suspect the PWM to regulate speed might be more about regulating the speed the drive reads and writes bits to send over the data lines than the physical speed of any motors.

Because you can't use the pins on the drive interface, your next best option will be to drive the stepper motor directly with a stepper motor controller. You'll need to do some (de)wiring in the drive, but stepper motor controllers should be reasonably compatible with Moppy.

[DJthefirst]

It is a 6 pin stepper motor I’ll see if I can trace back the traces to the chip and if it has a pwm and step pin

[Lothean]

If it's a 6 pin stepper motor, it should be compatible with the DRV8825 or the A4988.
The input voltage of these does not affect the motor (it needs to be atleast 8.5V), just set the current very low to start and see if the motor gets too hot.
These previsously mentionned board are cheap, not hard to use for beginners like me and have the convenient STEP/DIR interface.
As said on the Pololu website (they sell DRV8825) :
"Some unipolar stepper motors (e.g. those with six or eight leads) can be controlled by this driver as bipolar stepper motors. [...] Unipolar motors with five leads cannot be used with this driver."
https://www.pololu.com/product/2132

[DJthefirst]

The part I find weird is if I trace it back it goes to an ba12003 buffer and then out to the input. So it means it the stepper was driven by the computer?

[Sammy1Am]

Hmm, that does seem weird. On the one hand, "normal" floppies have their stepper motors sort of driven by the computer in that it says when to step (so it's not too far off from that), but on the other it seems weird that the computer would also need to track the current state of the motor (that seems more like an IC thing).

[Lothean]

http://www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/733481/ba12003_rohm.html
If it's the chip in question, it's a transistor array
You need to go further in the research, give us details about where everything is connected ?