[TriEmbed] Running old hard drive motors with a MC: DRV11873 and DRV family ICs

[Collin Ladd]

Hey guys,

I was asking around at the last meeting about getting good RPM performance
out of a salvaged hard drive motor. I had to do some shopping around for
the lab, and I thought this might be of interest to anyone with old hard
drive motors sitting around.

 This IC  <http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/drv11873.pdf>sounds almost too
good to be true for me, but for about 2 bucks you get back EMF sensing
speed control, lock sensing and a handful of other features. The best part
is the low parts count required--just a few caps and resistors. It takes a
PWM input and is pretty microcontroller friendly. I will probably just use
a 555.

1.5 A cont isn't going to spin up anything huge, but TI has a family of
higher power ones... I think (haven't had time to look around).
 http://www.ti.com/product/DRV11873/compare << probably can find one here.

Depending on when I make our order, and how many I ruin during prototyping,
I might have a few extra to hand out at the next meeting.

I read that HDD spindles are made to spin CCW only. Any truth to that?

--Collin, the liquid metals guy
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