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In search of smooth-spinning hardware to use as a rotary input device, nvillar made use of an old hard drive - resulting in a sweet controller with excellent aesthetics -
We admired the quality of the bearings in the motor that drives the disk plates, enjoyed the fact that even a soft flick would get it spinning for a long time, and wondered whether we could sample an output from it when it was spun by hand, in much the same way that an electric motor, when turned, acts as a dynamo and outputs a voltage.Nice pushbuttons! See the instructable for all the project deets - HDDJ: Turning an old hard disk drive into a rotary input device [via Hack a Day]The answer is yes - and it's a very simple process to turn a hard disk into a rotary input device that has some unique properties. All you'll need is an old hard disk drive, a few op amps, resistors and a programmable microcontroller of some kind.
Cool! Must be hell for fingerprints though!
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I've just built a working prototype of a gadget inspired by this, but using a CD-ROM drive motor instead of a hard disk drive motor. Most of the HDDs that I had already dismantled only brought out three wires from the motor, which made me think about other brushless DC motors. CD-ROM drives and VCR head drum motors, in fact. That led to a design based on the three hall-effect sensors that are normally used for commutation, plus three comparators (TLC3704 chip). It works, so now I need to interface it with an AVR chip.
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