- Hard Sound
- The inspiration
- When I was browsing though a Barnes and Noble's periodicals section I noticed a "2600: the Hackers quarterly" for the Fall of 2002 a little old as it was early 2003 but it got my attention. Picking it up I was skimming though the contents to see if I wanted to put down $5 for it. Hacking on vacation, password grapping attempts, Pewter box, set up a server behind cable modem connections, and then my attention was brought back to pewter box. If you've looked at the history of any of the computer companies from the homebrew club you've probably noticed boxes most notible the blue box know for producing the signals for free long distance and few boxes for phone phreaking still worked. So I skimmed off the page 27 and took a look at the pewter box it wasn't for phone phreaking it was instruction on how to make that dead hard drive a speaker. Cool but I didn't want to spend the money then. I probably should have for the fun of it but I didn't.
- The desire
- Fast forward a day I'm at home not wanting to return to school and feeling bad that in two weeks I haven't done any hardware hacking aside from failing attempts at getting the wearable mac working in some degree. Then I remember the 2600 from the day before and remembered that I had a dead HD in the tool box. A little research and I've found a site with instructions on whats needed, it looks simple enough so I dig out the hard drive some wires and the soldering iron and begin
- The build
- Its easy enough Open the case disregaurding any and all stickers saying something along the lines of "Warranty void if removed" its dead anyways and if your like me the first owner got rid of the thing a long time ago. The Quantium I used had 7 screws and one nut, the nut and one screw being under one of those stickers I just told you about. From there you might want to remove the bottom boards- the site I looked at did but I never got to the connections under said board to work.
Next get the two wires you'll use to attach this speaker to the sound scorce driving it, I used a twisted pair of wire from a PC's led attached to a head phone plug. Strip one end of each of the two wires and twist it so its easier to solder. Now locate the coil for the head of the drive. The heads going to be on an arm over the platters and the coil will more tan likly be on the arm closer the the electronics. From there find the contacts, these are going to be near the coil and should be easy to spot. The easiest way to test this is to hold a connection to the sound scorce to the contacts and listen for sound, if you hear sound its time to solder- if not try other contacts
I'm not teaching soldering here, so learn how to do that first. As you've found the contacts all you need to do is solder it and enjoy. You might like me find that you need to get an amp since some signals are going to be too weak to power the hard drive speakers.
- The results
- It produces sounds but to use as a speaker I'm going to need an amp. Someday I'll go ahead and build one from any number of amp prjects online
- Pictures coming, maybe, possibly - if I ever get an amp for the thing
