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
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.
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?
Yes, the junked hard drives have to work. If you use broken hard drives, the amplifier will cause the loose magnetic particles in the broken hard drives to signal a channel directly to the operator's brain, rearranging your neurons according to the sound being amplified which will cause you to become confused, and your memories will become jumbled, randomized, and replaced, and you will start to speak in tongues. I've also heard that if you use broken hard drives for this project, that it's possible that your liver will turn inside out (something to do with frequences being emitted on certain broken hard drives). This complication is more rare than the brain side-effects, though. I'd recommend you use strictly working hard drives to avoid these issues.
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."
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!
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...
They don't happen enough to be annoying..
Yes they do.
I have no problem with the editors posting a story again because they think it's still cool and not everyone saw it the first time, but that's not what happened here. They posted it again because they weren't paying attention and didn't realize this was already posted six months ago. It makes it seem like the editors don't care about what's on the site.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
...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."
Yes, this lack of professionalism should not stand. I suggest you cancel your subscription and demand a refund.
sic transit gloria mundi
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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This article repeats Feb 2, 2002 First by Hemos, today by CmdrTaco
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Jet Exhaust Affects Weather by Hemos repeats Peer-Review Process Confirms Contrails Climate Effect by timothy, Aug 8; a mere 3 days later.
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Rat Mind Control repeats Remote Controlled Rats both posted by timothy
3 in one day does seem a bit extreme, at least to my way of thinking.Perhaps the concept proposed by a previous poster (to help catch "duplicate" stories) might be a good idea.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but as I recall,
This, of course, shows the beauty of Open Source, though:
- I am a programmer.
- I have an itch.
- I'm going to scratch it.
Slash is freely available. I think it would be nice, in the true spirit of Open Source, to simply develop a link search and submit a patch.In fact, since I just spent all this time complaining and finding the links, I just downloaded it. I'll commence work on a patch immediately.
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!
"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
3 in one day does seem a bit extreme, at least to my way of thinking.
Perhaps the concept proposed by a previous poster (to help catch "duplicate" posts) might be a good idea.
(Note: no offense meant to the parent poster. I just find it funny that 5 of the 6 posts within my threshold are all complaining about redundancy.)
...and when it gets really bad, you start reposting Slashdot stories.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
"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?"