Slashdot Mirror
Turning Dead Drives into Speakers?
An anonymous reader writes "Why pay 500$ for Klipsch's latest speaker system? You can make something that looks way cooler for the price of a DIY amplifier and some HDDs out of a dumpster. It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"
Next week we'll show you how to turn a laundry basket and a speak & spell
into your own segway.
Too bad it caused serious head misalignment after a while.
The owls are not what they seem
"Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr... *cough*... "
Damnit, now I'll never get laid again.
"But baby, YOURS doesnt play soothing music!"
"Yes Police? Could you pay a visit to my neighbor. It's 4am, I'm trying to sleep, I have work in the morning, and he just bought a 200 gig hard drive, and a keg of beer."
- ufcker.com -
I can't find the story for the life of me, but I know it was on Slashdot a long time ago. (Does anybody else think Slashdot's search engine is a pile of crap?!?!? Of course Google wasn't much help either, this time.) Anyway, the last article was actually about using printers to play music (remember now?) but either in the story or the comments, it was also mentioned that it could be done with hard drives (and had been done for years). Pretty cool, yeah.. What about picking up the Van Eck signals from your monitor on an AM radio? That was pretty cool. Anyway. Yeah. I do some tinkering with robotics, and if you pick a bad frequency for PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), your motors will scream and whine as they act like speakers. You can use frequency modulation to make them play music and stuff too. Useless, but kinda fun to show people that don't know squat about electronics... ;)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
On the same site is a cool HOWTO of how to make an old monitor into a cardboard + plastic model of the final level from Doom ][. Just follow this link.
Rich
He lives two floors below me-- it's pretty wild. It doesn't actually need to spin the platters, though, and that not how the sound is created; the noise comes from moving the heads over the platters. Hard drive heads move via by a coil like those in a speaker, which he drives with a home-brewed amplifier. Similarly, he did it with a cpu fan, which yielded much more quiet results. Headphones, anyone? =)
This was back when computer geeks were very rare, so we were just one more group that shoved a few tables together in the corner, ordered beer, made funny noises, laughed, ordered more beer, rinse, lather, repeat.
-- MarkusQ
...that college dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects!
Having a mad scientist for a parent does have some benefits sometimes.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Next week we'll show you how to turn a laundry basket and a speak & spell into your own segway.
Warning!: This will reduce the value of your speak & spell and laundry basket.
Been there, done that. GOTTA be a better way to check for stuff thats been reposted.
-jhon
This is more a joke than a reality. I get a surround sound system with a sub for $30, and I cant really justify building one. Btw, do the junked hard drives have to work?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I know I've seen it before, at least once. Not absolutely sure if it was on Slashdot or not, but it's likely. I'm too lazy to do a search, though. Would be the second repost for today ... jeez.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I was sure I already saw this : http://slashdot.org/articles/02/02/16/1439211.shtm l?tid=133
This was posted back in Feb (See this link.) It even gives the same link...
In all seriousness, would it be all too hard to include some form of archive-checking feature to the submission queue? (Note: I don't use slash, so I don't know the internals...) Something like "if this link has been posted before, raise a flag to the administrator to make sure they really want to post a duplicate"...
Might weed out at least some of the repeats... Heck, maybe even a "link similarity" feature that could match http://foo.com as possibly identitcal to http://foo.com/index.html.
These repeating stories are almost as bad as those blasted X10 camera ads.
It's a real crying shame I can't block the stories like I block the ads...
from the reposting-four-month-old-stories dept.
Hmmm, I rather liked this mod, after having read it here. I even mentioned it about a month ago in some thread about DJ's and hard drives, having recalled reading it here. To find the link to this wondrous dupe, I simply pressed ALT-F2 from KDE, typed `gg:hard drive speakers site:slashdot.org`, and the very first hit was the article.
Sure it's a cool project. But I mean, poor guy who is getting slashdotted twice for the same thing... Oh well...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you get the ProMedia 5.1 set it only retails for $399. There of course is NOT a better speaker set available for the PC. Many many reviewers will be happy to attest to that fact. If I didn't feed my digital output to my DD receiver with a higher end sub/sat system then I would more than happily own the Klipsch.
Yeah. But this time Martha Stewart is the one showing you how to turn old hard disk drives into speakers. Same with turning the laundry basket and a "speak and spell" into a Segway. She's gotta come up with bail money somehow.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
How come this gets posted twice but my submission of an article by the IEEE Spectrum on John Carmack doesn't?
This is what we'll all be using once all the consumer speakers on the market end up with a Fritz Chip. :)
...that college dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects!
An anonymous reader writes "AMD is expected to announce a new chip to compete with arch-rival Intel. An overview of the new CPU can be seen here, and some more information is available on Anandtech. Go AMD!" I just can't wait to see the prices on them! UPDATE: 08/11 17:00 GMT by T: This might be a re-post, as we have word that AMD working on a K8 processor, which will run at around 2 - 3GHZ.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It's a good thing all these posts claiming Slashdot is redundant aren't redundant themselves. Whew, what a relief!
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Since this is a four-month old story, how about we discuss turning old HDDs into speakeasies instead? With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the disk drives!
I think this hard drive mod is clever, and I am glad I got to see the story, regardless if it was a repost.
Reposts may be annoying to the 10% or so of the readership that reads EVERY story. The repeat of a story isn't nearly as annoying as the 14 or so posts of "THIS IS A REPEAT" whiny crap that I can't filter out because some moderator doesn't have anything better to do than mod up such carping.
Congratulations on being able to recall a story from February. Christ, not everyone reads this site every day. Does that mean a radio station should not ever play the same song twice? Or a television station should never show a rerun?
Sorry you were so _wronged_, all of you that took the time to write a response to an article that you already read and increased the noise so I can't even read legitimate posts regarding the article.
Maybe you should go find something worthwhile to submit to the story queue instead of digesting every freaking story and then bitching about how it ran once half a YEAR ago.
> These repeating stories are almost as bad as those blasted X10 camera ads.
At least some of the X10 ads have cute chicks in them...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
The Afrotech guy has also made some other really cool things.. Like putting a PSX into your PC, turning an old monitor into a Doom II diorama, and using aluminum foil to improve you AMD Athlon's cooling.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
I eagerly await the day that slashdot has popups of duplicate stories as you visit other OSDN sites...
Seriously, what's wrong with reposts? They don't happen enough to be annoying.. I don't read Slashdot every day, and I hadn't seen this article. So it gives people who haven't seen it before a chance to check it out, and people who have read it can just ignore it.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Nah, it's CMU gettting the hit. They got some strong bandwidth there.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
This was posted about half a year ago, as I recall. I even took the initiative to make a 5.1 audio sound system with them. It sounds like crap, but it sure as hell looks cool ;) And when company leaves, I just pull the Klipsches back out of my closet *grin*
No comment.
Slashdot dupe nazi's be damned. Check out that whole site, there's a lot of quality humor in there. I laughed out loud several times.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
of COMMENTS!!!
/. are completely and utterly neglible. even if everyone here posted the dup notice for the sole sake of kharma whoring, SOMEONE has to mode these people up!
my lord people, is it not enough that the first 60 people making comments give the link to the previous story. compared to duplicate comments, duplicate STORIES on
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
alright, just kinda found this ammusing seeing the story again. Here's the original link:
here. My friend is the one who did this, when I saw the story here, I thought "Alrdy done, big whoop". But this kid is awesome, just in his free time he does this stuff. When he showed it to me (he lived a floor above me last year), It was really awesome. So many people thought it was a hoax, but it really wasn't. The greatest part is that the kid didn't think it was such a big deal. I'm shitting in my pants with harddrives doing this, and he just thinks of it as a week project for something to do. Very smart kid.
One other thing, the first post (submitted by me) took up 65% of Carnegie Mellon's bandwidth for that week. No slashdotting, but 65% of all the bandwidth cmu used up that week was people going to this page. The power we have.
...I can't wait until there's a minor update to the Linux kernel. Let's get some fresh stories in here!
"Derp de derp."
Come on guys, I don't have enough mod points to mark you all redundant. Why dont you quit beating a dieing horse and either say something constructive or let it go.
I'd to know where to get that (heck, i'll pay for the s&h)
--- d'oh
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
here: www.afrotechmods.com
/.
heck, it was even on
As a happy reader, I'm now very excited to see Slashdot has reached its 100th episode and can be seen on the WB or on UPN when ever I want. Hopefully FOX will also pick up on the trend and place Slashdot into their lineup after the Simpsons.
Why use dead hard drives when you can use repeat /. articles? Come on, Taco...
This may be a dupe, but just about now the last IBM 75GXP failed. It's great to know what we shall do with them. The story back in feb was a tad to early.
We wish...seriously we get so many problems... And it's only gonna get worse very soon when everyone comes back, and all the new freshmen want to "test" their new connection.
Maan
In the seventies, they did refer to disk drives as using "voice coil" technology. And loudspeakers did, and probably still do, use a strong magnet containing a deep, cylindrical groove in them into which the "voice coil" nests. In a speaker, the magnet weighs a few ounces, the coil is perhaps 3/4" in diameter, and it and the speaker cone weigh a fraction of an ounce.
In a Digital RK05 disk drive, the magnet weighed pounds, the "voice coil" was about the size of a tin can, and generated enough thrust to move a drive assembly weighing a fraction of a pound. The recoil was enough to make the cabinets shake visibly. Under the right circumstances, disk drives of the sixties and seventies could and did walk across the floor like an unbalanced washing machine. I'm not sure I believe the stories about computer operators having "disk drive races," though.
Anyway, I'll bet that if you rigged one of THOSE babies up as a loudspeaker, you could probably get frequencies up at least to thirty or forty Hz. You could probably get some nice Sensurround effects. Play a seismograph recording back through them and actually generate the feeling of a small earthquake, maybe?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I did this too. I took apart a dead IBM 75GXP (they are probably more useful as speakers) and soldered the speaker wire to the little wires on the servo arm. I connected it to my stereo (which is 100W/channel). The sound that sucker put out was surprising. At higher volumes, the moving of the arm across the platters gets annoying, so if you keep it from moving somehow, the sound improves, and you can crank it. This guy connected the amp to the drive's platter motor, too, but that didn't put out much sound for me.
was one I did a few years ago with an old B&W TV. Not sure how I pulled this off without sending a few thousand volts though me, but I did...
Disconnected the beam deflectors at the base of the CRT from the board. That results in putting one very hot little white dot in the middle of the screen. Then connect your amplified audio signal to the deflector coils. Put it up where every one can see it wiggle!
For more fun, choke the signal to the Horz. deflector for Bass only, then crank your mids and highs to the Vert. You may have to further amplify your mids and highs to have good deflection, but you get the idea... Anyway, pretty cool mod to do with your old junk...
Every few weeks? WTF man, you think I wanna miss a story if I don't check the site on Tuesday but I'm too dumb to check the archives? I want the entire history of Slashdot to be repeated every single day.
BTW: Cable modems roxxor ADSL!
"It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"
Doesn't sound as good as the Klipsch Promedia? Ouch...
The ProMedia series is famous for being very powerful for the money, but the sound quality is definitely below par. The mids are week and "flubbery", the highs are slightly colorized and overly enthusiastic. The lows are nice, but the transition from tweeters to subwoofer is off a bit. Monsoon speakers are good for those who want real sound quality from a PC at a sane (in fact, even cheaper than the Klipsch) price point. They are nowhere near as powerful though. Klipsch are for gamers and those who watch DVDs on their PC, where accurate sound reproduction takes a back seat to thumping. They are not good for the music listener at that price point. I have heard (no pun intended) that the new 5.1 Klipsch system solves many of these problems. Note that I have nothing against Klipsch--in fact, my home theater system uses KSB 3.1's, but the ProMedias do have their weaknesses.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
These people have waaayyy too much free time
Greater than 1500. But that's not at all the point. I'd say the same thing if I got a 1200 or a 1600.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Mplayer (divX too!)
What? Me? Worry?
The system, with woofer, midrange, and tweeter harddisks, lying on my favourite stolen cafeteria tray:
Ha! I can make the same quality sound using ONLY the cafeteria tray! Just use my Magic Wand!
-----
Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Already been Covered
All this talk about reposting has made me think. Just becuase I and almost everyone else has seen this story before doesn't mean that new viewers to slashdot have not. If its a repost story then ignore it. If not then enjoy it.
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
Slashdot, a news for nerds site, is reporting about a audio system where hard drives replace speakers. Over 208 comments are available.
I have found a similar use for old hard drives: a simple laser engine.
...
If you connect the voice coils of two drives as suggested, (to an audio amp) and mount two small mirrors on them and shine a laser pointer on them with the axes 90 degrees apart, you can make a very cheap laser display. Connecting the audio to both drives with a few other basic components gives the most fantastic squiggles in time to the music - anything with a sampled beat is brilliant, the same pattern repeats when the same samples are played. Connecting the audio to one drive and a triangle wave generator to the other gives an oscilliscope-style wave display, which looks fantastic with a bit of smoke in the air. (a domesic iron makes a great smoke machine, just put the proper smoke juice in it and crank it up high. a tube from an aerosol pump or car windscreen wiper pump can be used to inject the fluid directly into the chamber)
I am working on how to drive them from my computer as a laser engine to do real laser lightshows, anyone else done this? I'm thinking either from the soundcard as above, or a clear cover and actually use the heads to read the surface with positioning info on it for a closed-loop system
(of course, you can buy the proper parts (galvanometers) to make laser shows but they cost big $$$, and also recycling is good)
they are annoying becasue they aren't NEW!
how would you feel if the news, 6 months after the fact, repeats the story about WorldCom and thier 3.8 billion dollar fraud case... Like it was brand new and no one had heard it before?
Newsflash... this just in the Japanese have surrendered, WW2 is over!!
Its news ONCE, after that, its annoying, especially to those that have submitted stories only to have them rejected...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I think this was only posted once before. However, it was referenced in a comment to this story about the Atari Synthesizer a few days ago....
"There should be 2 little wires that lead into the induction coil that controls the movement of the heads"
heh, I thought induction coils were just a Star Trek thing. I learn so much from slashdot...
Really now? Actually, I got an 800 on the verbal section. I did more poorly in math, obviously.
This conversation has malingered far beyond what is sensible, though.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
These repeating comments are almost as bad as those blasted X10 camera ads.
It's a real crying shame I can't block the comments like I block the ads...
Well, you see, after the Remote control rats used these speakers to voice themselves once again on slashdot they decided they needed to give credit where credit was due and give a second appearnce to the speakers that made it all possible.
"It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"
Yeah. I buy speakers because they look good.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I have some spare speakers hear.. and would love a few extra gb/mb of space..
Thank you for keeping the suck-level high on slashdot.
Great now I can get the extra points in the hackers purity test! Guru here I come. :)
http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html
Why would you want something that doesn't sound good? I want to enjoy listening to my new lord of the rings dvd. Besides, I paid less than $500 for a nice pair of Klipsch Legend Series (brand new & included shipping, model KLF-10) and have yet to see a pair of speakers under $1000 than even come close.
So uhh, would these be Speakers for the Dead?
This isnt about me not wanting to see it. I am, amazingly, smart enough to not click goatse links in the first place. Also amazingly, I have the amazing ability to type it into my URL bar whenever I /do/ want to see it. So given that both your assertions- that I am too dumb to not see it when I don't want to; that I have something against seeing it at all -perhaps now you can see my real point, the elimination of off-topic posts, such as this one.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All