Based on a concept originated by Afrotech Mods, Will and I disassembled some old hard drives we had lying around and rigged wires to the circuitry which controlled the motors on the disk arms. The cool thing is that doing this apparently causes the arms of the hard-drives to vibrate at the frequency of any analog signal you pump through the newly attached wires, which in our case would be the music coming out of a 450 watt stereo system I have.
While it is quite quiet, you can definitely hear the music coming from the hard-drive arm, and it is fairly clear. The only problem we found with it was that the bass was rather weak and that the audio sounded a bit tinny. However, after messing around with them for a few minutes, we found a solution.
Low Quality Video
A fun little project which is definitely doable by just about anyone with an old hard-drive lying around.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Chair-i-cade!
This is a bit of an old one, but worth posting. My friend Will and I were bored one day a few months after Dead Rising had come out, and we decided to attain the achievement for "5 day survivor" in the unlocked infinity mode. What this translates to is essentially hiding and eating in-game food for approximately 10 hours real-time. Yeah, it was boring, and we have no lives.
That being said, we decided to dick around with zombies (as is the point of the game) while wasting time. After we got tired of running zombies over in trucks, throwing shopping carts at them down staircases, skateboarding around the mall, and killing the other survivors, we decided to make a barricade in the food court.
Low Quality Video
Please excuse my voice, I ended up posting the video at around 4 in the morning, so I was barely awake while narrating.
As I stated in the "more info" box on YouTube, the game ended up crashing at around 7 hours real-time, but we did waste the time to try again at another date and succeeded. Totally not worth it, though making the barricade was fun.
That being said, we decided to dick around with zombies (as is the point of the game) while wasting time. After we got tired of running zombies over in trucks, throwing shopping carts at them down staircases, skateboarding around the mall, and killing the other survivors, we decided to make a barricade in the food court.
Low Quality Video
Please excuse my voice, I ended up posting the video at around 4 in the morning, so I was barely awake while narrating.
As I stated in the "more info" box on YouTube, the game ended up crashing at around 7 hours real-time, but we did waste the time to try again at another date and succeeded. Totally not worth it, though making the barricade was fun.
The "Free Flow"
My latest and greatest project thus far has been the computer I am typing this post upon. Nick-named the "Free Flow" (a pun on both the appearance and the nature of the substance), my new computer is a mineral oil submerged computer. Instead of giving a breakdown of every step I took, of which you can find better versions on the two previously linked sites (which were my inspiration), I'll go over the differences in my project versus theirs.
First of all, while the resulting computer is fairly impressive looking as it came out, I went through several attempts at more complex case designs before settling on this one. Originally my intentions were to create a plexiglass mini-tower of sorts attached to the back of the tank to house both the drives and the radiator/pump combination. I quickly found out, however, that plexiglass is extremely difficult to work with if you do not have the correct tools.
Using a jigsaw to cut the material, I had to make sure to have the blade running just fast enough to avoid splintering the edges or chipping the surfaces, and yet slow enough that it didn't cause the plastic to melt back together behind (or onto) the blade. For making holes, I found it actually was cleaner and easier to run a drill bit backwards to melt my way through the plexiglass than it was to drill the normal way, which could get caught up and crack the whole pane.
Next I attempted to create a simple angled stand of sorts which would connect to the back of the tank. The idea was to lay out the hard-drives along the back of it and have the radiator on a hinge which could swing out during operation, but be pulled in if the computer was to be moved. This fell through for two reasons: Firstly, the DVD-RW drive would have to be placed under the hood of the tank, which would result in me needing to create a plexiglass sleeve to sit on top of the motherboard, extremely complicating the assembly process. Secondly, the tank, when full, weighs far too much to maneuver anyway, so going out of my way to make the entire setup easily transportable was a bit moot.
What I ended up doing was creating a plexiglass stand (think of an upside-down T) which sits in the tank with motherboard mounting posts drilled and glued into it. The motherboard was mounted on this stand, which was placed in the tank. The power supply was set on top of the base of this stand, and all the cables and hoses which needed to be run were sent out the back corner of the tank hood. The only exception to this placement was the VGA connector which had to be cut into the actual top of the hood, due to a lack of space.
I then created an L shaped stand out of wood (for ease of assembly, though it ended up looking decent despite my initial concerns), and placed a pump, radiator with two 120mm fans, my hard drives, and my DVD drive all upon it. The tubing I used for the cooling system is all 1/2" inner diameter, which is honestly complete over-kill. As a finishing touch, I recently added an aquarium "bubbler", which actually adds a lot to the previously "lifeless" system.
As for performance, I'm not an expert overclocker, but I'll let the screenshot speak for itself.
So far the peak temperatures I've gotten on it are 91.8 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), with an idle temperature of closer to 88 degrees. I'm certain I can push the clocks further without trouble, but I simply haven't gotten around to fine-tuning them yet.
All that being said, here are links to a video of the computer:
High Quality (Stage6 DivX)
Low Quality (YouTube)
All in all, I'm extremely pleased with how this particular experiment turned out.
First of all, while the resulting computer is fairly impressive looking as it came out, I went through several attempts at more complex case designs before settling on this one. Originally my intentions were to create a plexiglass mini-tower of sorts attached to the back of the tank to house both the drives and the radiator/pump combination. I quickly found out, however, that plexiglass is extremely difficult to work with if you do not have the correct tools.
Using a jigsaw to cut the material, I had to make sure to have the blade running just fast enough to avoid splintering the edges or chipping the surfaces, and yet slow enough that it didn't cause the plastic to melt back together behind (or onto) the blade. For making holes, I found it actually was cleaner and easier to run a drill bit backwards to melt my way through the plexiglass than it was to drill the normal way, which could get caught up and crack the whole pane.
Next I attempted to create a simple angled stand of sorts which would connect to the back of the tank. The idea was to lay out the hard-drives along the back of it and have the radiator on a hinge which could swing out during operation, but be pulled in if the computer was to be moved. This fell through for two reasons: Firstly, the DVD-RW drive would have to be placed under the hood of the tank, which would result in me needing to create a plexiglass sleeve to sit on top of the motherboard, extremely complicating the assembly process. Secondly, the tank, when full, weighs far too much to maneuver anyway, so going out of my way to make the entire setup easily transportable was a bit moot.
What I ended up doing was creating a plexiglass stand (think of an upside-down T) which sits in the tank with motherboard mounting posts drilled and glued into it. The motherboard was mounted on this stand, which was placed in the tank. The power supply was set on top of the base of this stand, and all the cables and hoses which needed to be run were sent out the back corner of the tank hood. The only exception to this placement was the VGA connector which had to be cut into the actual top of the hood, due to a lack of space.
I then created an L shaped stand out of wood (for ease of assembly, though it ended up looking decent despite my initial concerns), and placed a pump, radiator with two 120mm fans, my hard drives, and my DVD drive all upon it. The tubing I used for the cooling system is all 1/2" inner diameter, which is honestly complete over-kill. As a finishing touch, I recently added an aquarium "bubbler", which actually adds a lot to the previously "lifeless" system.
As for performance, I'm not an expert overclocker, but I'll let the screenshot speak for itself.
So far the peak temperatures I've gotten on it are 91.8 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), with an idle temperature of closer to 88 degrees. I'm certain I can push the clocks further without trouble, but I simply haven't gotten around to fine-tuning them yet.
All that being said, here are links to a video of the computer:
High Quality (Stage6 DivX)
Low Quality (YouTube)
All in all, I'm extremely pleased with how this particular experiment turned out.
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