Roman Black wrote:

Guys, a while back I needed some robotics parts and asked around
a few local repairers for old (dead) fax machines. With a couple
of phone calls I got about 10 old faxes that had been traded in.
These are junk and most shops have to pay $$ to dispose of them.

Most (thermal paper) faxes use two stepper motors, one for feed-in
and one for feed-out of the paper. 7 of the ten faxes were like this.
The motors are usually exactly the same part, and commonly have
attached gearing of 7:1, with 48 step stepper motors, six wire
unipolar at 12v or 48v. So you get a matched pair of motors from
almost every fax you strip.

I used a matched pair of motor-gearbox for a small robot experiment,
a 48 step motor with 7:1 gearing is just about perfect to attach
a wheel to and put them in your robot. Speed is about 1 to 2
inches/sec depending on wheel size. And torque is quite good,
surprisingly. If you are thinking of starting from scratch don't
rule out the fax motor option. :o)

PS. Faxes also have good modular switchmode supplies, stepper
control chips, 1x16 or 2x16 LCD hitachi displays, and about 40
tiny leds for the reader. And lots of matched cogs/shafts etc.
Well worth stripping if you want to play with robotics.
-Roman
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Thanks a lot Roman! That's a very useful piece of information.

Next time I visit a junk shop, I will specifically look for a fax machine
which seems to have a wealth of parts for a robotics enthusiast. Previously,
I used to look for only junk printers and floppy drives!

Bala

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