Re-purposing of a dead hard drive motor

I thought this recent project of mine could inspire people on how to reuse the spindle motor on obsolete or crashed hard drives.

After all, it's a shame how these state-of-the-art motors often end up in the bin despite being in full working condition.

I built a so-called "ringing table" for microscopy by creating a drop-in replacement for the original disk controller on a twenty year old WD drive.

My board has a PIC processor, a three-phase spindle motor driver and a simple button-and-led user interface right where the SATA and Power connectors used to be.

It actually worked pretty well. There must be other things one can build from this basic concept! More technical details about the project are laid out on my personal blog.

https://espenandersen.no/ringing-table-from-a-dead-hard-drive/