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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."
Another post where it looks cool at first, but not really. So the guy used magnets FROM OLD HARD DRIVES (tech connection = yay) to power a standard homebrew generator. Whoopie. Of course, the hard thing, as in all electric generation, is getting the generator to spin, which isn't done with the hard drives. If he had powered up an old computer and used spinning hard drives to run a motor WHILE they were working, and powering a led from the spinning of the hard drives, that would have been cool. Sorry, not an impressive hack.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
He's using a lathe plugged into the mains to supply the kinetic energyy to make the magnets rotate. (Using mains electricity to generate electricity)
I know he's just doing that for the sake of experimentation, but it would have been nice to see some real world figures (ie using wind/water to supply the kinetic energy)
This is slashdot, news for nerds. I think this article pass's the test. Just because its not practicle doesn't mean it shouldn't be posted.. You never know if it will inspire someone to invent something that will change the world, as unlikly as that is.. Someone will at least learn something from it..
Has anyone thought of a slashbot? Some distributed thing where the URL goes out to volunteers and has a way to let US store off some poor sites stuff and retrieve it via one metaURL? Something on the order of a distributed Squid server so it's not too far out of date.
I know I read the faq but...I want to read the story NOW.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
that's because the lawn mower used enzymes (read: no energy required) to break apart the grass and release chemical energy. The hdd situation proposed would give most people the idea of a hdd that spins a generator that creates energy to power the hdd. which, of course, either lets entropy win and stop spinning or break the laws of conservation and thermodynamics and whatever other big words i can think of
YOU SUCK BALLS!
gee, this article is really full of a hell of a lot of stupidity. i suggest taking physics 101 at the closest university/college (if this guy can get in). a little bit of knowledge about electromagnetism would save him from publishing bull... like "I have no idea yet what the effect of adding a second spinning ring of magnets to the back side of the coil will be, but I'm sure it will be significant." or "At this point, seems to me like an alternator built with 7 coils hooked either in series or parrallel-(or a combination) would perform reasonably well at low rpm."...
when for $600 I can get one premade with the nice honda name brand on it that runs at 1/2 load for 14 hours on one gallon of gas, is quiter than a lawn mower and includes an inverter, handy 110v outlets, and premade metal frame
actually, there are 200 amp alternators available that will only pull about 15 hp total from the engine, so you can easily run 5 of those together for 1000 amps at 12 volts. of course, you will still need to set up a drive belt system to run all of the alternators but that can easily be done with double v-belt pulleys or two large serpentine belts. then all you need to do is set up a regulation system to sync all of the alternators together but it can easily be done. even after the losses due to inverting, you'll easily be able to handle 80 watts at 120 volts. more than enough to run a whole house.
> they will no longer need us humans as
> chemical batteries
i hate that bit so much. why can't they just use something easier and more efficient to handle to get their enenergy, say, bacteria?
i guess i just don't like plots where integral parts of it have to be explained by "it has to be that way, or there wouldn't be a story for a movie".
You're mostly right. There were certainly MFM/RLL drives with voice coil actuators. The really cheap ones (IE: most on the market at the time) used stepper motors. But I had several with voice coils. I even had some full height 5.25" drives with voice coil actuation; they had several large, strong magnets in them. When they moved those 14 heads around in a mere 40ms (!) rapidly, the table would shake. The drive I remember best of that type was the Seagate ST4096, an 80MB full-height 5.25" drive, weighed 3kg I bet.
But mostly at the time, if you found a drive that had voice coil head motion, it was a higher performance drive like SCSI or ESDI, not MFM/RLL.
But what the heck, it's not the only thing wrong with this article. Stuff like this is the sort of thing I do with my 8 year old kids, and would expect it out of a 6th grade science fair, though I would hope that the kids would be able to build a more efficient unit than this guy does.
If your new here, I hope you have a strong spine because a lot of people will complain that its a waste of time, and that you have no life.
Personally, I found it interesting. I have been meaning to do something with all those HD magnets sitting om my fridge.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on