hard drive speaker

2 Articles

Robotic Glockenspiel And Hacked HDD’s Make Music

May 2, 2017 by 12 Comments

[bd594] likes to make strange objects. This time it’s a robotic glockenspiel and hacked HDD‘s. [bd594] is no stranger to Hackaday either, as we have featured many of his past projects before including the useless candle or recreating the song Funky town from Old Junk.

His latest project is quite exciting. He has incorporated his robotic glockenspiel with a hacked hard drive rhythm section to play audio controlled via a PIC 16F84A microcontroller. The song choice is Axel-F. If you had a cell phone around the early 2000’s you were almost guaranteed to have used this song as a ringtone at some point or another. This is where music is headed these days anyway; the sooner we can replace the likes of Justin Bieber with a robot the better. Or maybe we already have?

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Speaker out of a hard drive

Hard Drive… Speakers?

March 3, 2015 by 17 Comments

Speakers really aren’t that complex to make. In fact, if you’re clever about it, you can make a speaker out of just about anything. [Afroman] is kicking it old school with a hack he first did back in 2001, but now, in video form: Make your own HDD Speaker!

All you need is an old hard drive you don’t care about anymore, a bit of flexible wire, and an externally powered amplifier (no your cellphone will not work!). If you don’t have an amp, [Afroman] even has a tutorial so you can build your own Class D Amplifier on a breadboard!

First off you’ll need to crack open the HDD enclosure. You might need a torx or hex key to get past the manufacturer’s “safety screws” though. Once it’s open you’ll need to locate the hard drive head — this is the small metal arm that looks kind of like a record player tone arm. It’s actually controlled by a coil, you know, just like a speaker…

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