*** Ideas needed for developing interactive displays....

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Sep 7 11:27:34 2004

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 11:03 -0400, David V. Corbin wrote:
> >>> Jules, yes a large hard drive seeing would be very
> >>> interesting. <snip> .... the size of a washing machine but
> >>> all glassed in top... lots of power lots of heat......
>
> While I have not been following every message in this thread..It seems like
> a replica might be the best way to go. Could definitely "play some games" to
> make it more reliabile, lower-power, etc. Whould stilll give the look and
> feed of the classic drives [oh how I remember a row of RP-06's spinning
> away!]

Yep - I was going to do this with a more modern drive (5.25") and stick
it in a wall-mounted cabinet along with a keypad and display (I've got
some nice vacuum-fluorescent 7-segment displays lined up for the display
bit).

I'm hoping I can replace the drive's cover with a homebrew perspex one
without too much crud getting in - data reliability isn't important but
I'm not sure how reliable any embedded servo information will remain.

Other option is to drive the head voice coil directly - in theory that
bit's not too hard, but a lot of drives are clever enough to shut down
the spindle motor if something's amiss (such as the heads not responding
to movement from the logic!). I'm not sure how easy it'd be to work out
how to drive the spindle motor.

cheers,

Jules
Received on Tue Sep 07 2004 - 11:27:34 BST