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Build A Stereo From an Old Hard Disk
An anonymous reader pointed us to an amusing little hack site that demonstrates how you can build a little stereo out of an old hard drive. Of course I don't need a stereo for I am a human beat box.
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There's gotta be SOME kind of law this violates.
Whenever someone does something cool with music or technology these days, it seems they get SUED by some American company!
C'mon. DMCA maybe? RIAA violation? It's gotta be somethin!
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
> Of course I don't need a stereo for I am a human beat box.
I thought marriage was supposed to fix that!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Now to build that receiver from an old shoebox...
There was a different article like this one over a year ago. The other person made 3.
That's what i've been saying for years. I've used old harddrives for many things. These includes:
1. Weapon (seriously.. excellent self-defence tool. Saved my ass once)
2. Ash-tray (screw it open)
3. Toy (Am i the only one who find those rotating plates amusing?)
4. Paperweight
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
an .mp3 to see what it sounds like?
Is this some kind of joke?
I've never seen such a bad write-up (yeah, even on Slashdot), and this is also an old story and a dupe, it was on Slashdot like a year ago.
Does anybody else out there remember a program for the Commodore 64 that use the 1541 floppy disk drive to make music? By moving the drive head at different speeds, it played "Jingle Bells" or something else like that. The drive still ran OK after that one. Can't say too much on this project, though.
Yeah, yeah, it's possible to build a stereo from a hard isk...
I'm sorry, but I don't think very many people enjoy the screeching sound of a needle penetrating a harddisk-platter.
Gnusay -- for all your talking gnu needs.
Nowadays home cinema systems are really expensive for you, you're not going to buy them, why? just because you can build one of your own!
Thanks, man! I was thinking about going out and getting a nice surround sound system, but you just saved me hundreds of dollars!
Joking aside, this is a neat little hack. We actually did this in my physics class in high school (along with other fun things like plugging a pickle into an electric socket).
The most fun part of that page, though, is to refresh it and watch the counter at the bottom go up. In just the time I took to write this message, it went from 850 to 1400.
"Take the hard disk and open it, may be you will need a little torx screwdriver if you don't have it, take the hard tools: the drill and eat them with it."
Can anyone translate this for me?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
From cup holders to stereos, just a few more ideas and I will be ready to retire my Pentium2 and recycle it into good junk.
Sig temporarily out of service.
The song "YATTA" will get into your brain and it won't leave. Except that in the hard disk video you can't quite hear it all that well.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Ok--it's a speaker )which is really neat).
Butt it's 1 speaker, so it makes it mono, and that's it.
I thought it was going to be something to play/store music on. Unless there's more, we've been jipped.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
I think you need TWO speakers for that. Yes, a RAID streo system is in order.
My "stereo system", computer with two harddrives is the best source of white noise around. Unfortunately, my power supply is louder.
the most powerful magnet on a computer is in the hard disk.
what about on the speakers?
Very simular to a post a while back, Afrotech's Hard Drive Speakers!
p ea kers.htm
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~hsakr/hdspeakers/hds
Here she goes...Taco posted this like in August - What gives?
My MythTV HowTo
Pa-chew!
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Is it me, or are there lots of bits left over after this mod...why not remove a platter from it's spindle, and glue the coil to this - you then have a shiny voice-cone - then mount all your gluey mess back into the case...you then have a quite nice looking shiny flat panel speaker!
You can then show this to your friends, and have them beat you for being a geek...
Would look cool though.
just need some sake and some wood to put the finishing touches on it
Others have done it... here's a 3-way speaker reported on
Why are all these people suddenly making projects that have been done over and over, and reporting them as "new ideas"? Just like the jet engine made out of a turbo-charger the other day... that's been done hundreds of times! Heck, it's even been done on Junkyard Wars!
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
... mean that you can get a harddrive from an old speaker?
He has loads of other hardware hacks up.
as the original.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
the following stories:
* DIY ipod;
* DIY home media server;
* DIY wireless speakers (bluetooth, wifi);
* DIY ethernet speakers;
* DIY home SAN;
etc.
We had three-way speakers before!
does anyone else here beatbox? i mean, excluding those who do it really crappily? oh hell, include those guys too, as long as they have some spirit.
mr. rev "the beatbox guy" [1] aaron
(or so i am called at school, u of mn duluth)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
At last we are catching up with the Commodore 64, which was able to have its 1541 disk drive generate music ("Bicycle Built for Two", as I recall, was the main demo song)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
In any case it would work far better if the coil was kept within its original magnet, and the edge glued to a diaphragm. It is designed to work that way! If you were only wanting a woofer, you could simply attach the diphragm to the existing head arm, but don'y expect any response above a few 100 Hz.
I honestly wonder why anyone bothers with something so stupid anyway.
Huhuhuhu.
Does anyone else remember making music using the Sinclair microdrives? I don't know what was up with quality assurance at Sinclair (except that Clive couldn't afford any), but the drives all ran at different speeds. So get yourself a dozen QLs (or ZX microdrives, or ICL One-Per-Desks), work out which notes they correspond to (relatively, no need for concert pitch here!) and then get programming! Starting and stopping the motors on the various machines will pump out da choons.
Ah the good old days. Remember when hard drives were the size of washing machines? Remember when we would walk them across the room, by programming the head seek.
Build a stereo? The guy built a mediocre speaker out of a coil of capper, a magnet, and a sticker. This doesn't even begin to qualify as a two-channel audio playback device, which is what people normally mean when they say "a stereo".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Sounds kinda interesting.
Do you have a link to some pics for the slashdot crowd?
Thanks,
-Me.
then maybe you should get to work on making one and submitting the story. Talking about it won't get you there.
The problem is that nobody cares what you'd rather.
Contributing greenhouse gases by eating bean burritos? And no, it wasn't Cowboy Neal who ripped one; it was an AC.
lost the link but /. reported on a howto make you own speaker. same simple setup, still pretty cool.
How come no one posts "We have had this story before!" every time there is a story saying that Linux will rule the desktop market within 1 year?
I was just reading the article (strange I know) and I realized that it is a mono source. So the title of the parent post should be build a RADIO from a hard drive, a small but important detail.
This is a mirror http://www.terra.es/personal/sorgocondenado/speake rbox/
Hay if I ripped one I'd be an AC....
At least untill the air cleared.
Then I return as me and pretend nothing happend.
I don't actually exist.
You might want to keep them away from your
credit card and watch.
build a cheap projector for TV, using commonly available items ? I want to see movies on a big screen without hurting my wallet...
Yes, there was also something very simular in 2600 magazine a little more than a year ago.
I use them to hold stuff to my walls - they're attracted to the steel in the heads of drywall screws. It's also a great way to find where your studs are - because that's where the drywall screws are.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I once connected the audio out directly to the voice coil of an old disk, without dismounting the head assembly. The sound output was of course pretty low, but definitely audible and of relatively good quality.
And it still works when I am done hunting bears.
Would it be possible for this guy to learn English (or another language) before posting his wacky ideas? I mean, read this page. It's practically unreadable.
This is why engineers make $80k a year -- and literate engineers make twice that.
if you want to use stereo jack, you need a stereo plug into it. a mono plug just gives you half of the stereo, not both.
so without knowing it, the author got it right by connecting up a stereo plug as mono.
This was already posted (at least, an identical topic) within the last year... in case you were wondering where you had already seen this before.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
the worst part of soldering in your underwear is the flux you have to use to make the solder stick. it really stings.
or maybe the whole idea is fluxed up, I don't know....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yeah, i've done glasswork, flux burns. But also if your using electronics solder, with the flux built it, the spatters will burn the top of your thighs pretty good. Not that i do boardwork in my boxers often...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
This page gives instructions on turning a dead hard drive into a clock case. Not only do you get a clock that works, but you get to keep the magnets from the motor for other fun.
It's a little lame (the hard drive doesn't do anything, you attach a clock movement to the back), but it's better than throwing the drive in the trash.
A G4 tower is probably heavier than a classic iMac (not the lamp) and it also has nice handles. G5s have handles too, but they're too sweet to use in anything other than a life or death situation... Although an iMac might have better aerodynamics for distance though.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
When I first learned about this (on slashdot actually) I tried building a couple hard drive speakers for our university lounge. They actually worked pretty well, the only hard part being soldering to the thin, insulated wires (need to sandpaper down to reveal wire).
We hooked it up to extra speaker outputs on the back of an ancient radio amp in our lounge so you can switch from regular speakers to hard drive speakers. The hard drives are actually wedged into corners of a wooden cabinet, and the real nice effect is because they cause the wood to resonate. Overall, the output is pretty loud!
But what in your underwear needs soldering? Are you some type of cyborg?
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
but only in Soviet Russia.
I don't consider a single speaker as a stero, nor would I a pair ~ Its just a speaker! Where's the driver (amp) hack?
Much like the Commodore hack people have mentioned, we did one of our own:
In our (underfunded university ElecEng) research lab, we needed a simple (ok, cheap) device to position an NQR sample and move it back and forth through a few inches of travel. Eventually, we settled upon using the drive from a dot-matrix printer. What we had tried before that though, was indeed a hard drive.
We found a massive old (platter?) drive. The thing used 15inch disks or something. (Sorry, I don't have better info than that.) The read/write head was controlled by a pretty heavy magnet and coil.
Basically, we hooked the thing up to a power op-amp. DC offset was used to center the thing on its travel length, input was a sine wave from a function generator.
Well, a careless undergrad was setting this up one day, and instead of using sub-Hertz, set the function generator to something like 200 Hz. (3 orders of magnitude higher than we intended.) Well, damn if that drive didn't moan, and loudly.
Playing around with it, it turned out that it had a relatively decent frequency response (considering it was a disk drive!) It was only a few days before I HAD to bring in a PoS Casio keyboard to hook up to that thing.
Since people from down the hallway came to ask us to turn down the music, I think it was sufficiently loud. >:) Of course, once they realized what was producing the sound, they wanted to play!
That thing should still be laying around here somewhere. It makes for a neat demonstration for the Intro to ElecEng freshmen, and even the tenured profs get a kick out of it. And, OK, the speaker built in the linked article is good as well, would make for a nice reachout program. (4h, boyscouts, etc. given some magnets and magnet wire.)
I say that because I'm a ninja, & I'm trying to bring this martial art into the 21st century. Throwing stars are just so last millenium. ;^)
testing out my trending skills
...a "human beat box" can possibly be married. Hell, they'd never even get a girlfriend! I mean, come on...have you ever watched one of those people "performing"?! Talk about guaranteeing oneself a life of celibacy!
Didn't I read about this here on slashdot like 5 years ago? If not from here oh well, but it was at least 5 years ago I saw this page or one covering the same topic.
The Linux-Ecology-HOWTO describes some more ways to re-use old computers or parts of them.
hmm?
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.