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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."
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
... to power my shortwave made from coconuts.
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
A beowulf cluster of these! Oh wait that would probably be a raid array...
I live in New Zealand. I wish we had electricity :(
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
fresh buttered bread + cat = Free electricity
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
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!
when for $600 I can get one premade with the nice honda name brand on it that runs at 1/2 load for 14 hours on one gallon of gas, is quiter than a lawn mower and includes an inverter, handy 110v outlets, and premade metal frame
He put up pictures .. so it must be open source. And the arrangement of the magnets spells out 'M$ 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
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.
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
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.