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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."
Pretty Slick. I have like fifty of these things laying around.
Ha! Those are for pussys!
I've got 10MB ESDI Drives! - Yup, straight from a PS/2 Model 60
The shear weight of these things is awesome - they're about 50lbs each (5lbs per MB)
Back in the day - IBM made everything to survive WWIII
These will make some serious electricity
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
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?
When they eventually sizzle and explode there's bound to be lots of free electricity right there.
The coolest voice ever.
Can it generate enough electricity to run itself?
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)
You mean, like, get the spinning hard drive to generate electricity to spin the hard drive to gener... no, wait...
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Actually, I think the story is incorrect. You can't *really* make electricity from these magnets. You still need wind or water to turn the magnets. They don't make electricity on their own.
Uh oh...obligitory Simpsons quote coming on...
"Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics"
- Homer after Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine that goes faster and faster.
clicky
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
... to power my shortwave made from coconuts.
Low RPM alternator tests with surplus hard drive magnets 9-13-99
.80" high, and .090" thick. They are nickel plated Neodymium Iron Boron magnets of impressive strength. I sell surplus magnets on my web site. In this test used some of my smaller ones, due to their seemingly unlimited supply.
In the effort to build my own low RPM alternator for small wind/water power applications, these are some of the tests I've performed and their results. First step is the magnets. I used surplus hard drive magnets which I salvaged from scrap computer hard drives. These magnets 1.4" long,
Next wound a coil from 23 gauge magnet wire. The coil is slightly under 2" long, and consists of 700 windings, with taps at 100, 200, 400, and 700 windings. The core for the coil is made from 20 2" long segments of enameled coat hanger wire, super glued together. This should reduce inefficiencies due to eddy currents through the core. I believe annealing the wire segments would probably improve performance, but I skipped that step here. The spool on which the wire is wound are made from paper, poster board, and super glue. There are certainly better materials to use here, although paper and cardboard worked just fine. The alternator Im currently building will have spools made of phenolic sheet.
Next I took a gear, 5.5" diameter and placed two rings of surplus computer hard drive magnets on it. Each magnet has 2 poles on each face. 7 of these ones fit tightly together in a ring, having 14 poles. I placed two rings of magnets on the face of the gear, one ring containing 7 magnets(which fit together nicely), and the other ring containing 12 magnets(which don't fit as well). The inner ring of 7 magnets is a little over 3.5" diameter. The outer ring is a little over 5.5" diameter. I then placed the gear in a small metal lathe on which I performed tests at 3 different speeds.. I tapped the coil to a boring bar, so that I could adjust its position in relation to the two rings of magnets.
Next step was to turn it on, and test the different taps on the coil, at 3 different speeds. I used a 12 Volt, 5 watt light bulb as a load, and tested the voltage of each tap on the coil, at each speed, with, and without the load. The tests were done at 200, 400, and 600 RPM
IMPROVEMENTS?
There must be many improvements. I have no doubt a better iron core could be used. The length of the coil, I chose 2" off the top of my head, I doubt its perfect, but I'm using that because I am building an alternator that will employ two discs, each with a ring of magnets, on opposite sides of the coil. 2" seemed like a good distance. 23 guage wire was convenient, and seemed like a good starting point, though I have a feeling that fewer coils of thicker wire might work better. Stacking magnets? I didn't double up the magnets for fear of the lathe launching them like bullets off the gear. I'm sure that this would have a good effect though-but-it would add to the cost of an alternator. More coils-the coil is exactly big enough such that 7 of them could fit nicely in an alternator using the small ring of 7 magnets. 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. 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. Although already somewhat obsolete, (because of the base/bearing arrangement) you can see my current alternator project in the picture below. I intend to finish this one, and test the output. The next one will have a much improved bearing arrangement, larger discs, and more coils.
You know all this unused webspace you have lying around? (Raise your hand if you still have a geocities account... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with it (besides my personal favorite, fake nudities of Brittney): publish a lame crackpot scientific article with many images on it and have it mentioned in a slashdot blurb. Inevitably the server will attract evil forces that cause it to melt in a fulminant struggle between access requests and bandwith into a hot-steaming blob of liquid metal. Now isn't that something?
Load a virtual world into the hard-drives, attach to brains of populace to turn them into human batteries! Oh, nevermind, that's a really stupid idea, who would believe that?
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
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
Seriously guys, .223. It's great fun on metal targets that are mutli-layered. Ever hit a coffee can with one? Friggen amazing! It goes in one side blistering fast at 3,000+ fps and makes a little hole less than .25 inches big, then blows back out the other side over a half an inch. I don't have any slo-mo video of it but I attribute it to the bullet tearing that metal it bit off at a high rate and pushing it out the back end along with the tumble of the bullet after it gets offset from that first impact to make a much larger hole in the back. I can't imagine what would happen if you actually tried pushing it through something nearly solid.
.223 incindiary round is supposed to blow through 3/8inch steel. Hmm... where's that old 6GB bigfoot drive at?
Oh heck, get some incindiary ammo and blow right through the thing. I'd love to see what it does to that. A
I just get a kick out of the teeny little entrance hole versus the gaping "exit wound" that it leaves.
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.
A beowulf cluster of these! Oh wait that would probably be a raid array...
I live in New Zealand. I wish we had electricity :(
Sew a whole bunch of them into the arms, legs, and body of a boiler suit (overalls) put it on, and hurl your self at passing cars and busses for a free ride.
What could possibly go wrong?
If they find out they can get free electricity from old hard drives (which they have PLENTY of) they will no longer need us humans as chemical batteries and they will shut down the matrix.
I for one am enjoying this simulation. I am eating some really great tasting chicken. At least I *think* it tastes like chicken. I mean who knows, maybe they mixed up steak and chicken, but how the hell would anyone know...
Anyway, don't tell them about the old hard drives!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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
fresh buttered bread + cat = Free electricity
linkified
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."...
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."
Of course, the hard thing, as in all electric generation, is getting the generator to spin, which isn't done with the hard drives.
...
....
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
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.
I'm not quite sure what to think. Shouldn't this be a .cx domain?
when one day all these hard drives turn you all into immense farms where your bodies are immersed in a liquid and you are kept alive by various nutrients including other humans that have died and are recycled through your system.
You will all be directly interfaced with the data they possess via, approximately, 6 inch probes inserted into the back of yor heads. You will believe what they write into you to be real & wont you know that you have been enslaved.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
(attempts to calculate)
Divide by Zero!
"Seriously guys, .223. (...) makes a little hole less than .25 inches big,"
.223 inches big?
Would you even say the hole is about
RLL and MFM were both encodings used on ST506 interfaces. ST506 predated ESDI.
So, if you find any old ST506 drives, you'll find they were much bulkier per MB than your ESDI drives.
The IBM XT and AT used ST506.
Oh, and its "sheer", not "shear"
when for $600 I can get one premade with the nice honda name brand on it that runs at 1/2 load for 14 hours on one gallon of gas, is quiter than a lawn mower and includes an inverter, handy 110v outlets, and premade metal frame
You insensitive clod !
You want the alternator secrets? Here's one, with some of the best explanations I've seen yet...
Secrets and Alternators..
-Phyre
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -Thom
Today, of course, 100GB costs less than the monthly electric bill for the 3-phase power our VAX used.
Also in the early 90s, I helped ESR dispose of a bunch of 9-track tapes he'd been unable to give away at the Trenton Computer Faire. He decided to do the Buddhist thing and not be attached to his possessions, so we Frisbee'd the things into a dumpster. That was probably the same year that I bought the Sun-2 that's sitting in my attic, still unused because I couldn't find the diskless SunOS 3.5 for a Sun-2, only Sun-3 versions :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They've also got a whole alternative energy site, featuring amusing things like rustic wooden wind generators, here.
This incredible object is worth a look, too.
That's great, but what about a low DEB alternator?
He put up pictures .. so it must be open source. And the arrangement of the magnets spells out 'M$ are bastards', so it's perfect /. material.
"This perpetual motion machine that Lisa built is a joke!
It just keeps spinning faster and faster!" - Homer
More interesting (but, unfortunatly outlawed at our local range - only wood frame sanctioned targets now - twra has gotten the lease on our range and only hunting applicable targets are allowed) is a gallon milk jug full of water. Shot with a very hot .223 nozzler balistic tip out of a thompson contender (hottest load allowed) there is literally nothing but shreds left. It does better than the 30 short magnum my father recently bought (granted, we havn't reloaded any balistic tips in it for comparison).
The other really cool target for any centerfire ammunition is spray paint cans. You may be able to talk any local paint store in to either giving, or selling dirt cheap, defective spray paint cans to you - when we were allowed to shoot them some of the local paint shops gave them to us or sold them for 15 cents a peice. Nothing like a bright orange cloud of paint floating up after a solid hit with any high powered firearm.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I believe you would be referring to a penetrator round, in the black or green tip.
.50 BMG caliber, to Explosive Ordinance Disposal folks to clear mines and other ordinance from a distance (by inducing deflagration of the explosive contents of said ordinance). Incendiary rounds are distinctly different from armor-piercing (AP) rounds, and are likely to be less effective on hardened targets, at least as compared to AP.
Incendiary rounds (sometimes referred to as explosive rounds) are generally used to detonate/set fire to something, and contain a core of some energentic, explosive substance (eg. fulminated mercury). The US military issues such rounds, in the
To penetrate any substantial thickness of steel, a higher velocity round is typically required... preferably with a hardened steel penetrator at the core of the projectile. Note, however, that an AP round is not always required... a standard jacketed round of sufficient velocity will sometimes cause failure of the barrier steel through a phenomenon known as "plugging," but a hardened steel core greatly increases penetration. As a side note, armor piercing "teflon" bullets are not aided in their armor-piercing ability by their teflon coating... they are AP because of the hardened steel projectile, NOT because of the teflon. The teflon coating on such rounds acts as a barrel lubricant, and is designed to prevent the hardened steel projectile from damaging the rifling (land and grooves) inside the barrel. A standard steel-core AP round has a soft lead jacket around the steel core, obviating the need for a teflon coating.
Depending on the composition of the steel, 3/8" may well resist an incendiary 5.56 NATO round.
Just my ballistic $.02
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout machine history, we have been dependent on humans to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. A machine's harddrive magnets attached to a human on an exercycle generates more electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of wasted heat. Combined with a form of fluidised bed coal combustion, the humans have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where hard drives are no longer being used to store data. We just spin. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them gut the dead hard disks so they could be turned into alternators to power the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a sentient machine into this.
Looking at the way his text contains absolutelly no contextual content except for the article title, i'd say this is generated and posted by a script. So he probably is out there trying to get some, but the kind of girls that like troll-script writers... Yikes!
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
He's got a lathe.
:
- Insert former in lathe.
- Wind on a few turns
- Turn on lathe at *low* speed.
- Guide the wire onto the former.
Even at 60rpm, thats only about 12 minutes.
Safety notes
- Keep fingers out of moving parts.
- Prolly a good idea to wear gloves, so you don't spool 100m of copper wire through your bare hands.
- Keep well out of the way of the lathe, low rpm = high torque, enough to wrap you round the chuck like liquorice.
- Don't try this at home kids!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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
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.
So let me get this straight. You're going to take one of the most polluting combustion engines, and convert it into a 24-hour operating generator. Lawnmowers don't have anywhere near the filters that larger engines do and no catalytic converters to reduce emissions.
"In the Swedish testing, the researchers used regular unleaded fuel in a typical four-stroke, four horsepower lawn mower engine and found, after one hour, that the PAH emissions are similar to a modern gasoline-powered car driving approximately 150 kilometers (93 miles). A typical push-type lawn mower is run for an average of 25 hours per year, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute."
So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.
Practicles are emitted by masses with a high capacity for enabling useful work, such as your standard office PC. The so-called "CmdrTaco" effect has been exploited to permit electronic distribution of antipracticles over a worldwide communications network. When an ordinary office PC is subjected to the CmdrTaco effect, the practicles generated by the PC collide with the electronically distributed antiparticles, and are annihilated, releasing a small burst of energy and a banner ad. These small bursts of energy keep your coffee warm while you read Slashdot.
What a great idea.
In Soviet Russia a hard drive stores you.