Here's an ingenious way of recycling an old hard drive - turn it into an elegant looking, if slightly impractical, timepiece.
Yep, the device shown here is actually a clock. It was made using an exposed hard disk, an old laptop power supply, and a couple of circuit boards that rotate the disk and move the read/write head to show the correct time.
Details on how the clock works, and how it was made, can be found here
(automatically translated from the German).
It's a bit hard to understand exactly how the device works, but basically a 50-Hz alternating current is fed into a circuit to measure passing time, while a second circuit controls the movement of the disk. This rotates through 12 steps representing each hour of the day, before quickly spinning back to the number-one position when the 12 hours is up.
The write head, meanwhile, tracks each passing minute by moving gradually from left-to-right. Apparently there's even a key that speeds everything up, so that you can set the time in the first place.
It's a really neat project that reminds me a bit of the beautiful clocks
made from old Nixie tubes
Via: Hack a DayWill Knight, online technology editor
Labels: computing, hardware