Hackaday reader [svofski] sent in a fantastic looking hard drive-based POV clock (Google Translation) created by a maker in the Sichuan province of China. The clock, like the one [svofski] built, relies on LEDs placed behind the spinning platter to create the POV effect.

Quite a few carefully placed cuts have been made to the platter, which make up the segments required to display both numbers and letters of the alphabet. This isn’t a simple 16-segment POV display however. The font uses a lot of sharp edges and odd segment lengths, so we’re guessing that quite a bit of care was taken in the production of this clock.

You can see a demonstration of the clock in the video embedded below, which shows off its ability to display numbers, text, as well as a handful of simple patterns. It looks like there are some details available on the designer’s site, however it is all in Chinese, and Google’s translation is questionable at best. If only we knew someone that could give us a hand with deciphering the inner-workings of this clock…

[Loreno Minati] built his own stir plate out of a hard drive enclosure. It’s the exact same hack as the one we saw a few weeks ago. A magnet was glued to the center of a computer fan, which causes the magnetic capsule inside the beaker to spin. This creates a vortex, evenly mixing the liquid.

Using a hard drive enclosure is a brilliant idea. It’s designed to sit in plain sight so you get a very nice finished look. It’s also exactly the right size for the fan itself. A potentiometer mounted in the cap of the enclosure allows for variable speeds, and the DC barrel jack is being used for the power source. Now that we think of it, this may be the best use of an external HDD enclosure we’ve ever seen (even eclipsing its original purpose). Check out a video and image gallery of the project after the break.

We’ve categorized this as a beer hack since stir plates are often built by hobbyists for growing yeast starters used in home brewing.

[Thanks Jorge]

[Marek Walther] uses a ThinkPad x41 tablet for business on a daily basis. Since he’s on the go with the device he figures that hardware failure is eventually going to strike and with that in mind he purchased a second unit – slightly broken – to fix as a backup. He had never been excited about the speed of the tablet so he set out to find improvements. One of the options was to replace the traditional hard drive with a solid state model (translated). But simply dropping in an SSD isn’t going to make things faster. That’s because the stock drive uses a PATA interface. After a bit of snooping [Marek] discovered that the motherboard has a SATA interface that has a bridge connecting to the PATA plug. By removing the bridge and soldering a SATA cable to the board he was able to improve performance while increasing storage capacity at the same time.

Our friend [Sprite_TM] took a look at the security of a code-protected hard disk. The iStorage diskGenie is an encrypted USB hard drive that has a keypad for passcode entry. After cracking it open he found that the chip handling the keypad is a PIC 16F883 microcontroller. He poked and prodded at the internals and found some interesting stuff. Like the fact that there is an onboard LED that blinks differently based on the code entered; one way for the right code, another for the wrong code of the right number of digits, and a third for a wrong code with the wrong number of digits. This signal could be patched into for a brute force attacking but there’s a faster way. The microcontroller checks for the correct code one digit at a time. So by measuring the response time of the chip an attacker can determine when the leading digit is correct, and reduce the time needed to crack the code. There is brute force protection that watches for multiple incorrect passwords but [Sprite_TM] even found a way around that. He attached an AVR chip to monitor the PIC response time. If it was taking longer than it should for a correct password the AVR resets the PIC before it can write incorrect attempt data to its EEPROM. This can be a slow process, but he concluded it should work. We had fun watching the Flash_Destroyer hammer away and we’d like to see a setup working to acquire the the code from this device.

[Hubert] sent in his experiments using HDDs, CDROMs, speakers, and other components to make an XY laser plotter. Those carefully reading will note, its not all three to make one plotter, but rather three plotters each using a separate system. The setups have their advantages and disadvantages, and [Hubert] is sure to point them out; including circuit diagrams and pictures to help you on your own trials.

There is a little difficulty in reading English not so good, but considering we’ve never seen a single-laser vector plotter done before (spirographs come close, and no one wants to wait 85 seconds) it’s still very impressive.

[Thanks TJ]

At first we thought this looked hastily thrown together and quite possible useless. Then we watched the video, embedded after the break, and realized it is quite a handy bench sander. [Mhkabir] opened up an older hard drive, removed the read head, and added a piece of carefully cut sand paper. When you hook it up to your bench supply you’ve got a small sander ready to use.  We can’t wait to try it on some small PCB edges. Now that we’ve seen a sander and a chop saw, we wonder what’s next?

Sometimes your project needs a lot of non-volatile ROM, right on cue [Matthew] let us know how to not only connect, interface, read, and write to SD cards with a PIC over serial, but also how to do the above mentioned with an old PATA HDD. For those without a PIC/serial connection don’t fret, [nada] let us know about his Bus Pirate SD card hack, of which our personal favorite part is the creative use of an old 5.25″ floppy connector as the SD card socket.

Strobeshnik is a somewhat different twist on the hard drive clocks we’ve seen in the past. Though still technically using a POV effect, the Strobeshnik displays the numerals instead of a line. By altering strobe timing of an LED behind a platter with the numbers cut into it, he can display whichever number he wants. We think this is pretty slick.

This device is lovingly called the SPINmaster. [Linux-works] built it to spin up multiple hard drives before the motherboard starts up. It detects the power-up from the PSU and uses a relay to hold the motherboard in reset, indicated by the red LED. Each of four relays then spins up a hard drive and illuminates the green LED when ready. Once all green lights come on the reset relay shuts off and the bios starts up. This type of staggered startup takes a lot of the load off of an under-powered PSU. He’s posted firmware and there’s a schematic available too. We took a look at his video but there’s not much to see as it’s just the inside of the machine while it boots up.

This is the multichord, a one-string musical instrument built by [Christopher Mitchell]. The string is a 20 pound mono-filament thread stretched between a wooden bridge and the read/write head of a hard drive. The idea is that the vibrations of the string are picked up and amplified acoustically by the sounding box that serves as the body of the instrument. The frequency of vibration (pitch) is changed by adjusting the tension of the string through the application of various voltages to the HDD head. A relief spring has been added to the head to take the resting tension off of it, making it a lot easier to fine-tune the settings for each note. A keyboard made of twelve buttons selects each different pitch as the string is plucked.

[Christopher] is continuing to post great hacks; we’ve seen a glove input and a giant VU meter from him in the past. Take a look at the multichord in action after the break.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

[Dennis] got snowed in after the biggest storm in the history of the state hit. Like any good hacker he didn’t let the time go to waste. He decided to dig out his Neo Freerunner to give it a decent battery and a new OS.

The original battery for the Freerunner has a controller board integrated into the package. [Dennis] pulled out the board and attached it to a portable DVD player battery. After running it through a discharge cycle with another hack of his, the board learned the new battery capacity. The larger battery plus a fast-charger from SparkFun required a larger case. He made it happen by combining a 2.5″ HDD case with the original body courtesy of some JB weld. The final portion of the hack was to load up Android which is as simple as untarring the package onto an SD card.

It’s a bit big, but the battery will last and he’s got an open platform. Nice work!

[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the “secdata.bin” file which stores the ban flag. Please note, this will NOT allow the console to use Xbox Live, it just re-enables the HDD.

The quick and dirty of the fix is as follows: First the NAND is dumped from your Xbox 360 to a computer. After verifying the file, it can be opened in a HEX editor and the two copies of “secdata.bin” located. Once identified by date, the older version is injected on top of the newer to overwrite the ban flag.

Looks like this is not for the faint of heart, but if you got banned for modding in the first place this should be easy to pull off.

Update: Looks like xbox-scene now has a collection of apps to help you with this process. [Thanks CollinstheClown]

Here’s a collection of simple hacks you can do in between larger projects. After the break we’ll look at converting an iPod from hard drive storage to Compact Flash, build an LED desk lamp using LEGO and USB power for charging, and use an Arduino shield to add network control at the touch of a button.

iPod HDD to CF Conversion

[Richard] tipped us off about converting an iPod from a hard drive to a Compact Flash card. We actually did this a few years ago. Because we frequently buy broken electronics we had an old iPod 20GB with a broken HDD. Knowing we had seen one wire-porn type diy adapter and reported on another, a quick search produced a ready-made solution.

[Richard] went the same route by purchasing a CF to 1.8″ IDE adapter and a 32GB Compact Flash card. Just crack open your iPod, unplug the broken HDD, plug in the adapter and CF card, close the case, and go through a normal iPod recovery cycle.Compact Flash is considerably cheaper than solid state hard drives which makes this a cheaper conversion than a comparable Zune upgrade.

There you have it, what once was broken is now whole.

LED LEGO Lamp

[chAos] put together a desk lamp with parts he had on hand. A broken Bluetooth headset was used for the switch, battery, and USB charging capabilities. From there he built an articulated arm and body out of LEGO. The final step to provide illumination was just a matter of wiring up a white LED. This isn’t the most beautiful LED lamp build, but it gets the job done and adds a little “I built this” pride to your desk.

Mute button connected via the network

[Justin] needed a mute button for some speakers at the other end of the room. The music was played by a Mac mini so he built a mute button that sends commands over a network. By using an Ethernet shield for an Arduino he’s able to detect a button press and send commands over an XML-RPC server to get some peace and quite around here. The device gets its electricity by using power over Ethernet. The Ethernet shield is one of our favorite add-ons, taking on the brunt of the work in getting connected.

Don’t be afraid to send in hacks of all difficulty levels. If you’ve got one that’s a bit simpler, we may feature it as part of a group.

The hard drive in [Jason's] 24″ iMac was on the blink. He decided that instead of just swapping out the bad drive for a traditional unit he would upgrade to a solid state drive. Tearing apart high-end hardware like this can be a bit nerve-racking but luckily the drive is mounted right behind the screen so he didn’t have to take everything apart.

The SSD he picked up was 2.5″ but the mounting hardware in the iMac is only setup for 3.5″ form factors. We would have used a bit of hackery to make it work but [Jason] went with an adapter kit. Uh-oh, once installed there was no problem with the mounting but the SATA cable didn’t reach far enough to plug it in. The cable snaked around under the motherboard and would have been a lot of work to swap for  a longer one. He ended up removing all of the mounting screws except for one coercing the drive close enough for the connection.

It worked for him and it can for you as well. If you do this make sure to devise your own mounting scheme so that you don’t hit the same snag.

[Photo: AppleInsider iMac teardown]

[via TUAW]

Saying that [Ian] had some overheating issues with his iMac G5 would be an understatement. After losing three hard drives due to heat he decided to do something about it. The first step was replacing the thermal paste with Arctic Silver. The solution for the hard drive was a little more unorthodox.

[Ian] picked up a 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue drive because of its very low noise rating. He used rubber grommets to mount it outside the case and ran SATA data and power extension cables through a quarter inch hole to the motherboard. He mentioned to us that the cutout seen above the drive is from a previous mod.

This certainly will fix an overheating problem but it doesn’t do much for the sexy style we’re accustomed to with Apple hardware.