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Old Hard Drives = Free Electricity
tylernt writes "You know all those old hard drives you have laying around? (Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with them (besides my personal favorite, shooting them): make electricity! While you're at it, you could do something more productive with that old lawnmower, too."
Of course, the hard thing, as in all electric generation, is getting the generator to spin, which isn't done with the hard drives.
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True; the article doesn't address the issue of spin, other than the author used a small metal lathe to bench-test the alternator.
It's not a ground-breaking invention, I'm sure this sort of thing has cropped up periodically over the decades in science fairs.
And the author is selling magnets online -- let's not overlook this motive (though I think it's reasonable and I might do the same).
But the article is engaging, and for those (such as myself) who don't know the details of building an alternator, it's a good introduction.
Furthermore, the author states, right at the top:
In the effort to build my own low RPM alternator for small wind/water power applications
It's this laudable motive that makes the article worth SlashDot's time. We are (on a good day, anyway) the successors to the Whole Earth Catalog
-kgj
For those of you NOT following events in NZ, we're facing severe power shortages this winter.
Down here we've not built any new power plants for many years, we've just had a severe drought over summer causing our hydro lakes to be nearly empty, and just to top things off our largest natural gas field has just started running out - several years earlier than expected.
We've been asked to save 10% power, or we'll likely face brownouts, just as it gets freezing cold here. Yaaaaay.
pass me the sheep.
I just logged in here for the 1st time ever. Someone posted about this webpage I made years ago (almost 4 years) here on this.... seemingly busy discussion forum! (and we had to bolt our server down!!!) This page is obsolete, I'll try to find the time to update it today. My new experiments with "homebrew electricity" are located at otherpower.com. Ive read a few of the comments and it seems many were thinking that alternator was a perpetual motion experiment. It was NOT!!! - the idea was wind power all along. But the alternator was impractical and ... even more badly designed than my more recent ones! (My more recent ones are very simple, but reasonably powerful and somewhat effficient considering their simplicity I think.
The problems with that alternator were many...
The coils were too long, and the flux from the thin magnets through the long coils was very weak, meaning more wire and high resistance.
It was basicly too small to create useful qty's of electricity.
The steel cores in the coils (there were 7) lined up perfectly with the the 14 poles in the magnetic rotors, so the machine cogged very badly - the blade for a small wind turbine could've never started. This also caused severe vibration.
The plexiglass stator was not nearly strong, or heat resistant enough.
Those were the main things...
Although I think hard drive magnets could surely be used in this application, the alternator design is poor.... I do many things differently now. Again - my later efforts are on in the "experiments" section at otherpower.com.
More recent, simpler, and