Ok, so I would like to make something cool. I have two hardrives that I have opened and that spins very well. I got several green laser pointers. I got a diffraction grating. I got mirrors. What can I do?. This might seem stupid but I don't really know, and maybe you can't do very much with this stuff, maybe you can. If anyone has done anythingg with similar stuff, please tell me. I wanna to something funny ;D
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FrozenGate by Avery
Two hardrives and some laser pointers...
- Thread starter Antracith
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If you have a pair of tin snips or aircraft shears you can cut the platters into little mirrors... If you glue the mirrors onto a couple of little motors (you won't find the right kind in the drives, sorry..) you can make yourself a simple spirograph.
Glue the mirrors to the motors at a bit of an angle so they wobble slightly as they spin, set them up so the laser reflects off one, then to the other, then vary the speeds of the motors to produce neat patterns.
Another neat thing in hard drives is the servos used to control the heads... I've been thinking of trying to attach mirrors to a couple of those servos and make some sort primitive of XY scanner... To start out I'll probably try just hooking the servos up to a stereo's speaker output, something like this: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/06/how_to_making_a_hard_drive_las.html... though eventually I'd like to try something with microcontrollers to see if I could actually draw meaningful patterns.
Glue the mirrors to the motors at a bit of an angle so they wobble slightly as they spin, set them up so the laser reflects off one, then to the other, then vary the speeds of the motors to produce neat patterns.
Another neat thing in hard drives is the servos used to control the heads... I've been thinking of trying to attach mirrors to a couple of those servos and make some sort primitive of XY scanner... To start out I'll probably try just hooking the servos up to a stereo's speaker output, something like this: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/06/how_to_making_a_hard_drive_las.html... though eventually I'd like to try something with microcontrollers to see if I could actually draw meaningful patterns.
Sounds really cool that oscillator thing. I have tried it now but it didn't work that well for me... I'll see if I will re-do it... The piece of glass flew away as I turned the HDD on and flew right into the screen of my laptop :-/ Now I have a big mark in the lcd... :'(
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You DO know that opening hard drives ruins them, right? These are old disks with no crucial data?
:'(
They have been broken a long time...
