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Here's how to make a fan a little more exciting by adding LEDs and some old floppy drive guts, Svo writes - "Prerequisites: 1 floppy drive, defunct; 6 leds, preferrably different colours; a short length of thin wire; a short length of thicker wire; some drilling and soldering skills...It involves carefully ripping the windings and rotor out of 3.5" floppy drive, drilling some holes in the nut holding the propeller and screwing the stator of the original motor to the nut... soldering 3 groups of leds biased in reverse to each other, to make them shine from current going in both directions. I used 2 smd leds too, they are actually pretty easy to solder to eachother. It's hard to explain the connections without the picture.. Basically if you draw a star of 3 motor windings, then draw a triangle connecting its ends, the leds will be in the edges of that triangle." [via] - Link.
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haha... I didn't realize hacked gadgets posted via my blog... What's more, I didn't realize I had enough traffic for that to happen :P For some reason it never showed up in technorati.
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Cool, thanks for posting this. Just in case it's not obvious (I should've prepared better explanation, but then I didn't realize it would make it here or anywhere at all), the floppy motor is used as generator and no electrical connections between the leds and AC power exist, so this is an entirely safe hack.
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