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Harddrive Speakers
paranoidia writes "Ever get annoyed by the loud noise your harddrive makes? I bet you never thought of actually using that to your advantage. A friend here at CMU actually took 3 broken hard drives and got them to spin at certain frequencies outputed by his computer. So in the end, three harddrives are actually now speakers! There are videos and a few pictures with explanations onto how he did this wonderous thing."
Wow, I'm glad I got up this morning and rushed over to my machine to check Slashdot and see what the latest important news in the OSS/FS world...only to find it was a few harddrives making noise :-/
Now we have the SLASHDOT effect! :)
"Every sound you hear in these movies is being produced by the harddisks and nothing else."
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The 10K drives in my G4 and the 15K drive in my SGI Octane are pretty loud, but it kinda makes sense... faster spinning SCSI drives have never been known for their whisper operation, more like a jet engine.
That said, most of my other drives in my Windows and Linux PCs are fairly modern 7200 RPM drives. My two newest Maxtor and Western Digital drives are so quiet that I sometimes forget they are spun up. Almost cool to the touch, too.
Now if only 7200 RPM drives would come with 7ms seek times. Heck, the drive in my O2, a 7200 RPM SCSI Seagate Barracuda ST318416 from almost 2 years ago has an average seek of 6.0ms with a max full seek of 10.5ms... a good 3ms faster than the fastest 7200 RPM IDE drives of today.
Umkay, I listened to that Matrix (sound) ... i couldn't hear anything but a *schhiiereiiiereiri* sound!? Yeah I know, my sound deamon is simply not good enough ...
IMHO, some people have got too much free time.
Life sucks.
Well, instead of going for the first post, like I should have, I decided to pull the pics and txt and a vid or two from the website. I submitted them to HardOCP.com since they are down with these cool ass mods as well. Its up to them to post it but if you go to check it out and its dead or gone, try HardOCP.com. No gaurantees as of yet.
If neither work - bookmark this page and come back in a week. It is well worth the check out. Its amazing.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I actually got to see this site before the inevitable Slashdotting! I RULE!
Not bad... 150 KB/sec. I wonder how long Carnegie Mellon will hold up to the /. effect :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I cant stand computer noise anymore. Maxtor and WD drives are almost quiet enough, but as you point out they are seriously lacking in latency. IDE isn't that great bus either (no disconnect ability). Desktop computers also have a problem with noisy power sources as well.
Anyway, I finally . A totally silent laptop is the way to go.
The owls are not what they seem
I remember the program that played "Bicycle Built for Two" on the 1541 disk drive motors. Sound quality sucked, sure, but DAMN, that was cool.
Ah memories of my Disk II swirl in my head. I recall someone wrote a program to swish the stepper motors in a way approximating the sound of intercourse.
I wonder if you can scratch the drives :)
Seriously though, out of complete ignorance, does this work in a similer fashion to vinal record players?
I also once wrote a machine code program that polled the cassette player read-bit (dont remember specifics anymore) and changed the background color and clicked the audio for every bit change. It was pretty cool to play your tapes "digitally" on a C64.
The owls are not what they seem
I had a maxtor hdd refusing to spin up and it was making funny beeping noises.
I thought that the harddisk came with speakers, but later on realised that those "beeping" sounds were caused by the coils!
I hope he knows that if he touched those PLATTERS he's going to DIE!
Those platters are HIGHLY TOXIC, otherwise they wouldn't lock them away in those air-tight drives!
You know, I love telling that to computer newbies. Someone told me that a while back, and it was so funny I had to further propogate the rediculous myth. I'm amazed how many people fall for it.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Does this "DJ Afroman" have anything to do with Afroman the drug dealing rapper? Download some of his songs on Morpheus, specifically Crazy Rap, and you'll see why I'm concerned with the legality of hard drive speakers.
Okay, this seems like an appropriate place to post my bewildered question :)
Is this really for real? I for one have had an opportunity to use a vibrator, and while I did notice that the pitch changed depending on how much resistance was applied to.. well, while I could change the pitch, I can't imagine that I would ever get a chord. Ever. Or emulate a french horn or a 120-piece orchestra.
So how the hell is he getting "Star Wars" out of those things? Is it really possible that vibrator, used by the most skillful hands imaginable, could be made to play "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" during foreplay, funny robot voices and all?
Three pitches, I could easily buy - some kind of cheap MIDI substitute. Human voice? Someone has to explain this better. If my girlfriend's vibrator starts talking to me, I'm ending it. Well - I guess that would depend on what it said.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr... *cough*...
Yeah, makes them sing... sort of.
Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 9.0)... the hell it does, it's called being concise, if anyone has heard of it.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Hardly "old news".
;-)
Here's the discussion you wanted anyway: Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers. If I remember correctly, there was a second Slashdot story posted about this site - either a duplicate or a Slashback article. Finding that is left as an exorcism for the reader.
I thought the recent article about the souce code for the Linux kernel being read over the radio was the dumbest possible techno-gimmick possible. Obviously, I was wrong.
Reminds me of a simpsons ep i saw a few days ago, marges old boy friend is now a millionare b/c he invented a modem that converts the old analog squeeks into easy listening music.
Carpe meam simiam!
I am actually shocked whenever I here a noisy, clicking hard drive, even though I know it is the norm. I never buy anything but the cheapest Maxtor I can find, and they don't make any noise I can discern over the computer's fan. Why PC manufacturers use anything else when Maxtor is usually the cheapest is beyond me.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
The only good use for this that I can think of is erasing a HD with a Microsoft OS.
"Why the hell did you do that to my drive???"
"It was running XP, you had to be saved. Not only that, but now you can listen to the Star Wars theme!"
"..."
A Beowulf cluster of ... Ahh nevermind.
Seriously though, we could be talkin 6.1 surround here with enough of these babies!
Please don't slashdot us! We need the bandwidth!
Heh, the web request stats will be interesting to look at. I bet the porn movies get lots of downloads.
I have a shitty sig!
Not only does it work off a lot of frustration, but the HD then acts as an omen to ward off other computer gremlins for several weeks.
imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
heh this guy should consider going into business... if he can get things at the right price break he might be able to make a few bucks selling geek specialty items... just put them in a nice case (and if he can demonstrate the sound live, i'd consider buying a pair...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
hilltop
While you're at it, why not make an old monitor into a fish tank. Remove all the electronics, and crt, and put a piece of glass over the front end, cementing and plugging up the holes with RTV. Then cut a hole in the top and add your fish.
Who are you? come down to 010 if u wanna say hi ;-)
Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors? I recall hearing they were often programmed to format disks very quickly, so I guess they could be used to play those tunes while the C64 works on something else.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
If my girlfriend had a vibrator, Id end it. Period.
I and my one-eyed trouser snake should be more than enough for her. No more silly talk about tongues, fingers or vibrators, please.
The owls are not what they seem
Wow...all my IBM DeskStar 75 makes are clicks of death! Quite impressive.
Anyone remember the Gadaffi virus on the Amiga? It was rumoured that it played strange tunes using the drive stepper motor. The info on it here backs this up, but I've never seen the virus in action... anyone care to elaborate?
I finally figured out to spell Dibona 's name Wow Chris ....please freaking change it ...love Geoff
Yup, but it was of course not really healthy for the drive. :)
...
These tunes got so popular at least in swedish computer mags that they gave *huge* program listings in the mag with literally tons of DATA statements, like
110 DATA 201, 34, 129, 123,
etc. Of course since it was the only way to program in machine code from BASIC... *shudder*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Reminds me of last week's episode of The Simpsons, where Marge's old boyfriend invents a device to turn modem static into music.
Thanks for the tip. I was wondering why they kept biting me.
Computer stuff is for work. What Ive got in my pants is for fun.
Now, the most important rule is: never mix fun and work. If youre working, dont let the pretty women screw with your head. Women don't deserve any better advice on technical matters than the worst male PHB or slob of a co-worker. On the other hand, if youre having fun out with the ladies, don't talk shop. You're a "technical consultant", not an engineer or a scientist.
The owls are not what they seem
This is why Democrats get laid more often than Republicans.
Cigar, anyone?
He connected the drives parallel to the amp, without any filtering? A lowpass for the big one, highpass for the small and bandpass for other would sound much better as with all drives heads moving similar.
afrodot.org
afrodot.org
Uhhuh. I still can remember typing in page after page of that kind of code from magazines. Imagine. The code and graphics like sprites and character sets were loaded in from DATA statements.
But wasn't all in vain. I can still outtype the younger hackers both in speed and accuracy. ;-)
The owls are not what they seem
Hey this Afrotech stuff is grattttttttttttteee!
Got a real kicker out of this one. Check http://www.afrotechmods.com/ for one hell of a site design.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Hehe... that's Awesome :)
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
We have a kickass connection here. I would be very surprised if /. took it down. Half the eastern cost bandwidth at one point or another passes through CMU. Cert is here, too.
Yeah, they had thier own processor, but they were NOT fast at formatting a disk, it took about 80 seconds, then you had to flip the disk over and format the other side (if you were so inclined to use double sided disks).
Oh, and copying a disk was lots of fun, considering that the memory could only hold 64K chunks at a time, and the disk held about 180K per side, I think (it was measured in blocks rather than KB back then). You had to keep switching the disks back and forth to make a copy of a full disk.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I didn't recognize the matrix music myself in that video, but the rest of them were fine, starwars worked.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Also this...
Well. You do realize that regular speakers only work by vibration, don't you? You get sound out of these the same way you get sound out of single speaker cones, by moving them through each individual sound wave.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I know the head in a floppy drive doesn't work the same way as it does in a hard drive, but I wonder if there's enough similarity to get the same effect? My FDDs seem to die more often than my HDDs so I'd try it with one of them before I take apart my hds
BTW- Yes the slashdot search engine is a steaming pile of shit. They really should buy one of Google's fine products or something.
In the near term though, try site:slashdot.org in google, to narrow the search. You can also try the linux search on google, www.google.com/linux.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The question is SHOULD this be done just because it COULD be done? The scariest part it that people actually think this is cool? I for one prefer my regular speakers.
I'm getting over 500k/sec here :) Basicaly instant downloads on these videos. If only the rest of the internet worked like this :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe someone will figure out how to make a CD-R play its buffer (filled with audio) through its headphone jack...like a sound card!
For geez sake thats the dumbest hoax i've ever seen. I mean the drives are not even moving in sync with the bloody audio. [hint: watch the "star wars" one].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Ok, a Beowulf cluster is multiple COMPUTERS (or at least partial computers) that are linked together to do distributed computing. A RAID Array is multiple HARD DRIVES linked together to emulate one large hard drive with redundancy. There's a big difference.
I don't know...a Dolby Digital EX or a DTS sound played through 6 sets of these could be cool (and über geeky)...don't know about the ".1" though. I think you'd have a hard time finding a hard drive head driver that could produce that low of a frequency!
-James
We used to do this with our Commmedore 64 floppy drives, or at least something close. You could control the and make it play a crude melody.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Didn't those disk drives contain their own processors?
Yes, they had an on-board CPU and RAM so it was possible to run custom programs on the disk drive. I had one disk-copy program that worked this way; it would automatically copy disks from one drive to another, without involving the main computer (the drives were connected by a daisy-chained serial bus, so you could even unplug the computer from the drive chain once you'd uploaded the program).
Yes, if you insert the right stuff into the job queue.
[Filler text to get through lameness filter. Yeah, that filter sure makes Slashdot less lame. Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda. I don't see how this is anything close to being only 6 characters per line.]
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There was a program called "drivemusic" that made the internal floppy drive play the "Condor Pasa" tune. IIRC it basically moved back and forth the head using some sort of pulse width modulation. Sounds incredible, but that marvellous machine gave the developers complete (and incredibly responsive) control of its underlying hardware.
A Beowulf Raid 5 Orchestra of these things!
The sound being produced is not the related to the noise some hard drives make. He's not spinning them at particular rates to get different sounds (which would only allow him to produce one frequency per platter anyway). He's vibrating them, just like regular drivers. Still a cool waste of time, but not the least bit what the posting indicated.
His site has loads of other goodies such as this (stupid mods) or again this (really cheap mods)
Back in my C=64 days, I remember finding this program that played a song ("sailing, sailing, ..." if my memory serves me correctly) using the motors on the C=1541 disk drive. Pity that just a few runs of the program would trash the drive. Ah, nostalgia!
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
... the amiga is so old that a HDD would be the size of a small suitcase. Yet this dude says that it's the smallest drive.
Don't ask me, I was too skint to have an Amiga with a hard drive, or even an amiga with a floppy for that matter, I had to stick to the spectrum (and the tops-20 machine at college - only 3 people allowed to use emacs at once otherwise it'd kill the machine!), but maybe this is a typo or this is a little bogus.
So: how big WAS the amiga hard drive?
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
wait so im confused.. is the music really coming from the hard drives or is this a joke...
He even did a hack(parody) on slashdot.
From what I can see the drives are not spinning at all, he is just using the voice coil of the drives as a speaker.
just for the record, this is probably the most fucked up thing I've seen in a while !
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I bet this technology could be used to move a cone of paper or other stiff material, which would move a large air mass and create clear sound vibrations, thus reproducing sound...
Nah, too crazy...
Seriously this is very cool and reminds me of the folks who put an AM radio next their Altairs (or whatever it was) and ran different instructions to create different frequency interference, thus creating music.
What I'd REALLY like to see is the microwave interference from a GHz PC fucking with a cordless phone or something, making it ring....could it be done?
Back in 1982 or so, I remember pr0n software for the Apple ][ that used the floppy drive (O, the irony!) for the sound effects. Same principle: it did it by moving the head (hee-hee!) back and forth.
And the brethren went away edified.
Found this while browsing around here... Afroman's parody (Afrodot.org) of Slashdot.
-David Ziegler
-
Anyone actually explore the rest of his site and find his own version of Slashdot, Afrodot.org, on there?
I spend time with my mom all the time, what are you talking about?
i used to do this with little motors, like the ones from cassette players over 20 years ago.
they wouldnt be very loud tho unless you touched the middle part to a large plate of something to vibrate it.
Police: Sorry sir, we can ask him to close Windows. Other than that we can't do anything.
Very fsck'ed up.
Search term: Musical.
1 6&mode=thread
First page link in results:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/23/16412
You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say "that's the bad guy."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Always mention you got a girlfriend/wife in some convenient way :)
"I guess it would help if I said what this is. Well, for all you cheap guys who have never played Doom before, this is my rendition of a scene from the final stage of Doom II. Our hero is standing on a platform in front of the mega demon bad dude and is ready to whoop ass with his double barrelled shottie. It is constructed in 3d out of cardboard, and has circuitry such that when I push the monitor power button things light up. And yes that is my beloved Donna in the background of the first picture."
I used to do this about 8 years a go with old 5 1/4 floppy drives that i scraped. or just use a steper motor from anything.
I was bored in the 6th grade and took to hooking stuff up to my stereo. onetime i hooked up a laser diode it was cool for a couple min before i turned the volume up to loud and fried it.
I used to hook leds, motors, laser diodes and nearly anything i could find to my stereo. The stereo died a year or so later turned it on one day and smoke was comin out of it. Not something i would recomend todo with anything that wasnt bought at a gragesale for 20$ but interesting none the less....
I wonder how may CMU students /. gets. What dorm are you talking about? I'm in Mudge....
And BTW, props to our servers for being completely NOT slashdotted.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I'm in West Wing. I know we get plenty of folks reading Slashdot -- especially during lecture thanks to our wireless network. This isn't even the first story about CMU (or a student thereof) on Slashdot's front page: Tom7's guide to breaking your computer has been there, I submitted a story about the Bill Joy synthetic interview back in 2000, and of course we made news when our beloved sysadmin pulled the plug on 70+ users for sharing MP3s.
:)
Ah, I love this place.
For more information, click here.
yes thiso do t.jpg
http://www.afrotechmods.com/groovy/takeover/afr
I'm in scobell, along with the guy who the did the hard drive speakers. And apparently someone who lives 2 floors above him, who we don't know.
well, duh eh ?
uhm, just a second...you have a girlfriend(a), she has a vibrator(b). And when you use a and b together you want to play music by using the exact right pressure...
Is it just me, or is that a very wrong time to play with geeky toys?
Just curious, what would one reply after finally succeding at the Star Wars theme and she asks what you're giggling at? Commit suicide by proxy by telling the truth? Just run? hmm
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Way back when, the printer us poor students were using for batch job print outputs was an HP Corvalis mumblemumble (can't remember the exact model name). IIRC, the printer was not a dot *matrix*, but a dot *line*, i.e. it was a row of pins that ran the width of the print line. No moving heads, part of the whole line would be printed in one shot. (If the mylar guiding band slipped off its control gears, your 200 page listing would be condensed in this black block 2/3rds of a page long.)
(Ouch. Bad description. But bear with me.)
Anyway, we all noticed the different pitches the printer would make depending on what was coming out. We all could make the beginning of a print job and the breaks between the different sections (jcl, code listing, code input, code output, billing info, end of print job -- more or less) without even looking at the printer.
So, one day, some smartass spent the whole weekend typing this weird HP-2000 BASIC(1) program that was that did not make any sense (mostly PRINTs)... But, when ran, made the printer screetch out Beethoven's 9th!!!
I wonder how long it took him to figure out what line pattern mapped to what note.
Hey, why print the Mona Lisa or Einstein's head (remember those old ASCII posters? Boy, was there a hot trade of the card decks to output those!) when you can litterally print music?
---
(1) The college used an HP-2000 as a front-end for the mainframe. If not using punched cards, you'd be typing your stuff on an ADM-3A's hooked up to the '2000 using some homebrew line editor to enter you job (jcl, source code & program data) and then used some magic program to submit it to the 3033 (? or was it a 370?) that was doing the actual processing.
What, just like you don't have to do with 'diskcopy a: b:' from a DOS window?
Would have been a lot nicer if they'd used base64 ...
It's not the platter spinning that's gonna give you any sound. It's the actuator!! The thing uses a VOICE COIL for atheist's sake!
Look, he's playing MP3s and using the harddisks as output devices.. hmm.. there must be something funny that can said about built-in DRM?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I'll be joining you guys in the fall (I've been accepted ED)
-bugg
Come on, man. Having sex with a girl is something almost every guy does, dozens of times over his lifetime. It's kind of like, I don't know, getting drunk, or eating a really tasty manicotti - fun! pleasurable! but mundane.
Now listening to the theme to Star Wars emanating from your girlfriend's nether region with the help of a wonderful piece of technology you've ingeniously turned into a speaker using only your amazing dexterity and skill - that's something almost no one ever gets to experience in an entire lifetime. I'm not even sure it could be done. Maybe with a lifetime of meditation and dedication to Zen?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
$ dmesg | grep hda
hda: Maxtor 90840D6
(more output snipped to appease the lame lameness filter)
It's pretty old I admit, but it's the loudest hard drive I've ever heard and it drives me crazy. Even when the drive is idle the spinning platters sound like a jet engine.
I think that site is really cool.. he definately earns my geek of the week award. Everyone of his little projects was either interesting or amusing :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Oh sure, I'm just not sure that's the time to be a full out geek is all... Maybe it's just cause my GF is a body piercer and has access to sharp needles needles should I be too distracted by shiny objects...
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/23/1641216.shtm l
That's the article you're thinking of. Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers.
Wow, I can only imagine how arousing THAT must have been...
*monochrome green naked woman, or possibly a tree sloth, it's hard to tell, moves across the screen at 4 fps*
"GRONK GRONK GRONK"
I'm getting all tingly just thinking about it.
Freedom: "I won't!"
That would be the "1541 Music Machine".
Taking advantage of the onboard 6502 processor and 2k of RAM, it made the venerable Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive play a crude, yet recognizable version of "Bicycle built for two", which was the first piece of music ever sung by a digital computer.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
altaic == Will =) (Scobell 3) I'll be down later on.
their processor was actually MORE powerful than the one in the C64 itself IIRC
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
hehe mod this up, more people should see it!
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
First, I could/would never do this, so congratulations. However, it does sound (I know, your microphone sucks) like there is a lot of the normal whirring and clicking of a hard drive laid over the music. Have you given any thought to cancelling this noise out, by perhaps writing something that would play a constant (or variable with rotation speed) noise opposite the humming?
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
An engineer who shall remain nameless (cuz I just know what'll happen here if I bring up where I know him from - the Coleco Adam - and yes, there were some very cool things about that machine for its day)
Anyway, he was charged with a program that would make sure the floppy drive was operating before doing other things, so to put it thru its paces, he had it access tracks in the correct order (and therefore musical pitches based on spin) to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" - hear the tune - everything's OK!
That - um *feature* didn't make it to 1.0 though.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Years ago, say in the early and mid 80s, Texas Instruments made a line of computers called Explorers, derived from the Lisp Machine of MIT AI Lab fame. The engineers at TI were pretty sharp, and had a good sense of humour, too. Upon power-up, the Explorers would go through a battery of self-tests which included (emphasis for relevance to the current story) seeking the heads of the *running* disk drives at audio frequencies to create a rising tone followed by a falling tone: whoooeep-wheeeou. I was at MIT at the time, and TI gave us a heap of these machines since they used the NuBus, which our group (Real-Time Systems , headed by Prof. Steve Ward) had invented. We were all a little suprised when we heard them make that noise, but became, in truly geeky fashion, completely impressed once we figured out how they did it!
-- pz.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Unplug the drives from the C= 64? When they're powered on? Heh, I hope you never did try that. This is a computer that could loose its magic smoke if you turned your printer, drives and system on in the wrong order!
Having sex with a girl is something almost every guy does, dozens of times over his lifetime.
Dozens of times over a lifetime, eh? Yup, I'm at Slashdot all right.
just remove the teeth. you can feed them with baby food.
Ianal, and I realise that some quite clever engineering would be needed in terms of timing and frequency, but being a writer and not a physicist I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't at least reduce noise, if not negate it completely.
So, will somebody who actually knows stuff respond and flame me for being an idiot and making suggestions on topics I only have a marginal understanding of?
A bunch of Aussies did it first, in 1951. See the story here.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm another one, living in Doherty. Yes, I'm the jerk who kept getting various subnets and several ip's banned for trolling.
I'm going to make my speakers store gigabytes of data!
this one might take a while. hmmmm...
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I know they have consumer devices for vehicle interiors now that let you cancel out the car noise, and change it to whatever you like, I'd like to find out if it's reasonable to set a cancellation system up inside a case. I bet it's still a little too expensive for widespread use though.
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Clearly, this post is not ontopic, as jews and their relation to the end of civilization has nothing to do with using hard drives to make music. You started a new thread, whereas posts such as this should be replies to the first post, in courtesy to people who use threaded viewing and can compress this sort of thing into one thread. I admit you are not redundant in this story and your subject is clear and descriptive. However, it is Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, and Offensive. Therefore is has been moderated as the rules state. Since you have shown your inability to make good use of the rules, and you have posted in all bold, and you have shown yourself stupid by posting a broken tag, i have no choice but to conclude that you are genetically inferior, incapable of productivity, and worthy only of the final solution. please die, thanks.
by the way, the lameness filter sucks.
well.. kinda...
;)
I once accidentially connected the internal PC speaker to the HDD led pin on the mobo... well it was some kind of "Harddrive Speaker"... more or less
--
I was doing this same thing with metal-bladed fans when I was a we lad of 12. I didn't make a demonstration out if it, but at least I've got some witnesses.
;-).
Heh... Although, back then, things that didn't have a practical purpose WERE NOT news
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
not my college...they're plastic. the napkin holders , on the other hand... ;)
"Redundant"? Brilliant. What's even more brilliant is that a comment posted almost 2 hours later is modded 4, Funny.
BTW, check out the time travelling Amiga 500.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Fished from a dumpster a mere 2 hours ago and now coming at ya live tonight.
FurbyTV!
(Thanks, Afro Tech Mods for the inspiration...tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999)
Now you can stream your music directly off the hard drive!
yeah, but why do you have a playstation in you pants? and would I need a special adapter to do the same with my dreamcast?
Winchesters (the drive, not the gun) use to make a singing noise while seeking.
If I recall, the 1541 had a 6502 and 14kb of ram. That was ironic, because I used it with my VIC-20 "computer" that had a 6502 and 3.5kb of ram.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Try it! It makes a really nice analog whirrrrrrring sound.
oh god, I laughed so hard now i'm crying and people are looking at me funny, why do I insist on visiting /. in public places!!
Well, after viewing this, I just HAD to try it out. =)
:)
I grabbed an old scsi maxtor 200 meg drive, and began ripping its guts out.
Now, this old drive is kinda clamshelled inside of the case,
with the heads, actuator, platters, and motor all in a case within the case.
I probed and probed the connectors on the ribbon cable attached to the heads,
Finally I found two with low enough impedance to be the coil for the actuator.
Next I grabbed some old 20AWG crap speaker cable and soldered it onto the the ribbon cable.
After checking again with the multimeter to make sure there were no shorts I hooked it up.
To my amazement, it actually worked!
After a few seconds, I could feel the drive getting quite hot.
So I grabbed a tiny heatsink I had lying around, and thermal epoxied it onto the exposed part of the.. err.. voicecoil
Much cooler now.
As for the sound, the quality of this "speaker" is quite poor.
Its alot like listening to overdriven headphones from across the room.
Then again, at some high frequencies, it actually rivals my Dynaudio home thearter speakers.
Simply amazing!
--Una
A ScanJet 4c (I think) we got back in 1994 had a Jukebox.exe program on the driver disk. It's been a while, but I believe it let you play MIDI files on the scanner stepper. Quite clearly, too. I think they yanked the program later on, though, I've never been able to find it again.
F.1.r.s.t P.0.s.t
Whois #dlf
WTF? U dont wanna come to CMU... I've been here almost 2 terms and I wanna get out! leeeeeeeave!!!
Now it would be something if we could use those Zip drives that died the "click death".
A looooong time ago, at a college not too far away, 1/2 inch tape drives were in very common use. The capstan motors were capable of small movements and could be reversed quickly. IBM had a demonstration set up at one of our E-Days programs with a paper speaker cone mounted on a small stick. The stick was clamped to a capstan and they had a program running to play quite acceptable quality music. IIRC, they could even control the volume. Since this was over 30 years ago, I don't remember all the details but I was impressed at the time.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
If you have a close look at the label (see here or here: sorry, couldn't find larger pictures), the last character is slightly different from the first (it does not have the oblique little dash like the first, so it is not a ``1'' digit).
OTOH, all the Commodore user documentation reported it as 1541...
dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects
:)
Among other things. Here at the U of Wisconsin - Madison we use use them as sleds.
Lots of fun trying to stop at the bottem of Bascom Hill before you hit the trees...
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
My next science fair project was building a multiplatform (Apple II, TI 99/4, Vic20, Atari 400, TRS-80 models III and II) network over cassette drive cables and RS-232 serial ports for the purpose of playing games, sharing and printing formatted documents with hyperlinks, and accessing incompatible peripherals. I narrowly missed advancing to the international science fair on that one, probably because it was ahead of its time.
The judges two decades ago didn't like to admit they knew nothing about computers-- the comments I got were along the lines of "the ability to use computers is a good skill but does not constitute science unless it presents something new or investigates something less trivial," writing off my creative ideas and all the code I wrote as just the way people use computers. A decade later, the same idea was no longer called "trivial," but "the single most important technological innovation of our generation."
Go figure.
True!
Weren't older Hard Drives called "Voice Coil"?
I also recall that the giant early Hard Drives were really large, and one older computer terminology dictionary referred to Hard Drive Racing (HDR)!
It said that the washing machine-sized drives could be made to move by precisely controlling head movement, to the extent that programmers conducted 'races' across the floor of the room.
Anyone who used such equipment confirm this?
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
they had the symphony of dot matrix printers. i downloaded the mp3's. it was interesting at the very least. i don't think they used the printers to make sounds (like this kid did with the hard drives). i think they took the printer noises and mixed them to produce a musical piece. the printers weren't the "speakers" they were the musical instruments, like in a real orchestra you've got violins and horns and stuff. hope this helps.
please me, have no regrets.
Nope, I was wrong. The 1541 had 2kb of ram according this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
But you could do it by running an audio signal through main coil.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
http://www.afrotechmods.com/groovy/takeover/afrodo t.jpg