Slashdot Mirror
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."
How sure are you? I remember reading about some robot lawn mower that "digested" lawn clippings using a chemical process in order to provide the power. A self-powering machine doesn't have to disobey the laws of thermodynamics. . .
also is teh amount of electricity produced from the HDD directly proportional to the size of the HDD??
I think it would have nothing to do with the size (capacity?) of the harddrive, other than coincidentally.
Since recent 100+GB harddrives use less power, their coils and magnets are smaller and not as strong.
I think the amount of electricity generated would more likely be inversely proportional to the age of the HDD, (as well the size^H^H^H^Hdisplacement) as the old ones were absolutely huge and probably have very strong magnets and voice coils.
Hell, rather than winding your own coil as this guy did, you could use one out of one of one of those old drives that were used to move the arm.
who needs electricity when you can turn those old hard drives (and fans, and anything else with a motor) into a speaker!? Stop trying to be productive and just jam out with them =P
s pe akers.htm
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hd
i work with a guy who amazed me with his last hard drive feat. he gyrostabilized a moped with some old hard drives we had laying around. i'm not quite sure how he did it, but it was something to do with the simple gyrostabilizing force from a few hard drives spinning would stabilize the moped. don't ask me, i didn't do it.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
Sigh.
Ten years ago I saw a Vax 780, with six 160MB Fujitsu Eagle SMD drives, discarded as scrap metal. The Eagles were unceremoniously thown off the loading dock, one by one, onto the bed of the salvage truck. At about 70 pounds each they made a rather satifying "clunk."
When you can just use a car? Come now... a 70's corolla with a 2t-c engine (typical for america) runs at about 75hp... You have the possibility, assuming your running at 3800rpm to generate up to roughly 56,000watts assuming 100% efficency.
Though the Vbelt system is typicaly limited to 3 devices on such a beast... Practical limit using car alternators is likely to be in the 200-300 amp range (2400 -> 3600 watt estimated)
Add your self a natural gas access line, assuming you have one, and you have your self a legit power source in the event power goes out. Most costly aspect of that would be the air regular, as well as some electronic feedback match engine speed to power consumption for best efficency.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This guy actually *hand wound* a 700 -turn coil to do this?? err.....
Today, of course, 100GB costs less than the monthly electric bill for the 3-phase power our VAX used.
Also in the early 90s, I helped ESR dispose of a bunch of 9-track tapes he'd been unable to give away at the Trenton Computer Faire. He decided to do the Buddhist thing and not be attached to his possessions, so we Frisbee'd the things into a dumpster. That was probably the same year that I bought the Sun-2 that's sitting in my attic, still unused because I couldn't find the diskless SunOS 3.5 for a Sun-2, only Sun-3 versions :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They've also got a whole alternative energy site, featuring amusing things like rustic wooden wind generators, here.
This incredible object is worth a look, too.
Well, if you kept reading his site you'd see that he has plenty of that kind of stuff. There's a page where he has a waterwheel (that he put in a small creek) he made from an old squirrel-cage blower motor, that powers an alternator and generates a constant 2.5 amperes or so (all day, every day) for charging a car battery. He lives in the middle of nowhere, COlorado, and apparently is into generating his own power.
What does that mean exactly? The motor is more efficient, or can draw more current, or what?
New Zealand has a pretty good climate for generating power using renewable sources.
;-) and have the resources to generate the power for the whole of europe using just the wind.
S it ekeyParam=D-B&CFID=476623&CFTOKEN=49498382&MenuPoi nt=D
In the uk we have a similar climate (but not as much free space
down in NZ you have wind, rain and lots of beautifull coastline. Try and pursude your government to do use these natural resources in a non destructive manner. They are just starving you of power so that you agree to build nuclear power stations the same as the government here did many years ago and is now regretting.
Don't let your government con you into taking on environmental time bombs.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/contentlookup.cfm?
sparkes
blog and junk
> 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?
Did you ever think that perhaps the machines were LYING to us about the chemical battery bit? Perhaps there is a deeper reason they keep us and the chemical battery cover story is to protect their secret or just to belittle us.
The possibilities abound:
(A) The machines AI is good, but not much better then human minds. They don't have enough processing power to run a simulation of the entire world down to the physics level for every human being in the world. The matrix is actually run as a distributed application ON HUMAN BRAINS! Each human plugged into the matrix is running a portion of the matrix as well as a portion of the machines OWN applications. Without us the machines lose a great portion of their own processing power and perhaps even identity.
(B) The machines are really smart and they realize that there is no guarantee that their current programming won't lead to an evolutionary dead end. If and when that happens they may need us in some unforseen way as source material to overcome that obstacle. We are an insurance policy.
Anyway... anything is better than they need chemical batteries that use up more energy than they release...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat