You'd need a simple user interface, like and LCD screen and a few pushbuttons. check out This LCD interface to a linux box for an example. There are surely many other examples out there.
All the hardware and software parts to do this yourself are already out there, mostly for free. Fetch an old pentium out of the trash, qet your own 20G HD. You already have a CD player and probably a sound card in the thing. You might want to hack with the power supply/cooling to reduce fan noise. Here is an example of why a slower machine would be better.
Since you probably don't want a video monitor atop your stereo, add an ehthernet card so you can remote manage it, or read the serial port console HOWTO. Install Linux, install mpg123 and cdparanoia, check out
The linux remote control project
to learn how to add infrared remote capabilities, and there you have it. Since it's on a LAN, you can access songs over the network, and vice-versa.
You could even build this thing diskless and access everything over the LAN, which would make it really quiet. Check out
The etherboot page
for booting over a LAN, or consider a flash memory drive (more money, but simpler to implement).
I'd have done it myself by now if there weren't 10^6 more important things to work on.
Thanks for the post! I had thought about a homebrew laser light engine a few years ago, and it occured to me that a dead hard drive would probably be the best/cheapest way to go.
What did you use for mirrors? Did they have to be lightweight? Did you leave the heads in the original drives, or remove them to get them closer together? Did you use a HeNe laster? Any other tricks you learned?
If I was experimenting with this now, I think I would use a dedicated microcontroller with a 12 bit DAC and power amplifier. I wonder what the maximum frequency response of the drivers is, maybe higher than 20kHz, so the filtering on the sound card might be holding you back.
My goal for this was to build something that would let me throw some arbitrary images and simple text against a wall. My hope was that I could do it with a fairly simple open loop drive, as a high speed closed loop control system sounds like it would take more than a couple weekends to get going!
Anyway, if you got it to do some nice graphics with the sound card, I'd be interested in checking it out....
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You'd need a simple user interface, like and LCD screen and a few pushbuttons. check out This LCD interface to a linux box for an example. There are surely many other examples out there.
All the hardware and software parts to do this yourself are already out there, mostly for free. Fetch an old pentium out of the trash, qet your own 20G HD. You already have a CD player and probably a sound card in the thing. You might want to hack with the power supply/cooling to reduce fan noise. Here is an example of why a slower machine would be better.
Since you probably don't want a video monitor atop your stereo, add an ehthernet card so you can remote manage it, or read the serial port console HOWTO. Install Linux, install mpg123 and cdparanoia, check out The linux remote control project to learn how to add infrared remote capabilities, and there you have it. Since it's on a LAN, you can access songs over the network, and vice-versa.
You could even build this thing diskless and access everything over the LAN, which would make it really quiet. Check out The etherboot page for booting over a LAN, or consider a flash memory drive (more money, but simpler to implement).
I'd have done it myself by now if there weren't 10^6 more important things to work on.
Thanks for the post! I had thought about a homebrew laser light engine a few years ago, and it occured to me that a dead hard drive would probably be the best/cheapest way to go.
What did you use for mirrors? Did they have to be lightweight? Did you leave the heads in the original drives, or remove them to get them closer together? Did you use a HeNe laster? Any other tricks you learned?
If I was experimenting with this now, I think I would use a dedicated microcontroller with a 12 bit DAC and power amplifier. I wonder what the maximum frequency response of the drivers is, maybe higher than 20kHz, so the filtering on the sound card might be holding you back.
My goal for this was to build something that would let me throw some arbitrary images and simple text against a wall. My hope was that I could do it with a fairly simple open loop drive, as a high speed closed loop control system sounds like it would take more than a couple weekends to get going!
Anyway, if you got it to do some nice graphics with the sound card, I'd be interested in checking it out....