][e paddle port annunciators...

[dalloff@gcfn.org (Dave Althoff Jr)]

For Christmas, my brother gave me a neat toy...a KNex Ferris wheel kit. 
Nice.  But the drive system on it is absolutely horrible.  It comes with a
little 3v geared motor with a battery box containing two AAA-size
batteries and a switch.  Trouble is, the motor has a worm gear, so it
can't slip, and the wheel has no clutch on it.  Lousy engineering.

But then, I have these ][e's lying about.  It seems to me that with a
simple bit of machine code, I could turn the paddle port into a neat
little DC motor controller, using the annunciator instead of the battery
box to power the wheel.

So the question is...How much current can I draw off of the annunciator?? 
Not being much of an electronics geek, but knowing that the motor won't
complain at being fed 5v instead of 3v...any advice for protecting the
computer?  

Of course the next step is to add a shaft encoder and hook it up to the
paddle buttons so that the computer can handle a "load/unload" cycle......
 8-)

--Dave Althoff, ][.
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