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Build A Stereo From an Old Hard Disk

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the because-you-can dept.

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.

10 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Harddrives can be pretty versatile by zaunuz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Harddrives can be pretty versatile by kzinti · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Am i the only one who find those rotating plates amusing?

      Not at all. I think they're beautiful. I have a little display in my study of hard drive platters salvaged from failed hard drives. I take them out, polish them, and prop them up. Illuminate them with a halogen lamp in an ikea bookshelf module... looks pretty cool. My favorite is a 9-platter stack that came out of an old full-height drive.

  2. Commodore 64 music? by isny · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Commodore 64 music? by Awptimus+Prime · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was wondering about the alignment issue.

      I ran a BBS on an old TRS80 with 4 floppies and was sending drives off over alignment issues every few months and that was from normal read/write accesses. Luckily, my local Radio Shack was cool and looking for support from the BBS community and ate the cost.

      Us TRS80 users had the tape motor relay as our audio toy. It was a simple coil relay that would make a very audible click when engaged or released. Though there was code to control the speed of access in BASIC, there were no limitations on what you could do with it in ASM. Apparently, the limitation was put in place to keep from destroying tape drives and the relay.

      I remember producing some really disturbing sounds, but ended up rigging the tape relay up to the power cable to my modem. With a small bit of code, a few wires, and raped cassette drive cable, it was relatively easy to turn the old RS 300 baud modems into auto-answer. Basically, splice the power cable to the modem, cut the cassette cable's drive motor and connect the two. Then splice the phone cable and connect the two live wires to the audio-in cable, then make a loop in ASM or BASIC that watches for a particular memory address value to jump from 7-10 to 250-255 for a few moments, then issue a MOTOR ON command and close the loop to power the modem who's switch is already flipped to ANS mode. Of course, this had limitations. I had to spend a lot of time tooling code for the BBS that would reduce the chances of a hung, dead connection (if the user hung up without logging out) as there was no actual carrier detection. My final solution was a TSR that would MOTOR OFF and reload the answer script if there was no activity for 2 minutes.

      That's another example as to why I always considered Commodites to be similar to what script kiddies of the mid-80's would have been, compared to the more traditional TRS80 hackers. The Commodites downloaded someone else's crap and ran it while us TRS80 ppl got out the soldering iron on a regular basis or learned ASM so all 64k of resources would be usable. :-)

  3. I'd rather by curator_thew · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the following stories:

    * DIY ipod;
    * DIY home media server;
    * DIY wireless speakers (bluetooth, wifi);
    * DIY ethernet speakers;
    * DIY home SAN;

    etc.

  4. Re:WTF??? by ion_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of course I don't need a stereo for I am a human beat box.

    I thought marriage was supposed to fix that!

    Now that it was mentioned, are there beatboxers in the /. community? I have practised the fine art of vocal percussion for a while, but i'm pretty much a beginner when compared to the masters such as Killa Kela, Kenny Muhammad, Rahzel, Scratch, etc.

    Humanbeatbox.com is a good site for information about beatboxing.

  5. Retro music! by grahamlee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Hard drive magnets are great! by victorvodka · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  7. why dismantle the disk? by fstanchina · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  8. I've tried this by bigberk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!