Salvage Challenge - Make Me Spin

The Challange
These are multiphase motors from video cassette recorders. Think they may be called Spindle Motors. Lots moving to dumps now. There are some uses for these, see: Motors: Brushless at: Salvage Parts and Sources. The challange here is to power them up as motors using the drive electronics they alreay have. Typically they have 3 to 6 connections. It seems like applying the right signals to these would be all that it would take. But what are the signals?



Answers
WestfW 18:41, 7 February 2009 (PST) Hmmph. Way to post photos with no chip numbers readable... I've investigated similar "modules" from CD and floppy drives in the past. All the logic is typically contained in that single big chip, but finding data for those chips can be very difficult. There seems to be a lot of churn in the marketplace as vendors try to reduce costs, and even if the chip is from an identifiable company, and that happens to be a company nice enough to have downloadable datasheets, by the time the product hits the scrap heap the particular chip it uses is likely to be obsolete and no longer listed. Here is a representative chip from Sanyo: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/sanyo/ds_pdf_e/LB1987.pdf I also don't have any faith in the board-level signals being consistent from one vendor (or even one model) to another. Sigh. Reverse engineering a particular motor board is likely to be largely useless, since the next VCR motor board may have a different pinout, different chips, and different behavior. One of the fine points of "salvage" is to pick a product that was released with a consistent design, in volume, so that if you figure it all out, you can get more, and so other people can use your data for their scrounging...

--russ_hensel 19:38, 7 February 2009 (PST)

Good Points, If it were simple it would not be a challange. I can get the chip numbers, as you suspected they are various, and chips have about 20 pins. But the board has only 4 to 6 pins so the point here is to spin it up using the 4 to 6 wires. This may or may not be a great approach. The interface on this level is probably simpler and more consistent than that to the chip. Schematics of VCR might help.

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