DIY Friday: A Hard Drive Clock

Hack a Day points us to today’s DIY Friday project: a hard drive clock that uses the actual drive mechanism and heads to keep track of time (as opposed to simply a regular clock mechanism with a recycled hard drive face).

 

Instructions can be found here. Don’t sprechen Deutsche? Google can translate:

The synchronous motor, which propels the magnetic disks, engages in 16 positions per revolution dead magnetically. 12 positions are used thereby as hour announcement, after 12 o’clock must run the engine of 5 steps further, in order to continue again with 1 o’clock. The write/read head, which is propelled with a stepping motor, engages likewise dead magnetically. It is used, in order to indicate the minutes within one hour. Beginning of the internal point it moves within one hour to the outside edge of the magnet disk.

Since it’s German, you can rest assured that your DIY project will run on time, but you’ll want to use the atomic clock at Fort Collins to set the clock correctly. (Consistency with errors creates consistent error.) 

Also be sure to check out this very cool video of another hard drive clock. (It’s available on YouTube, but embedding is disabled for this particular video.) 

If all of this seems a bit too complicated for you, for $5 you can make a Salvador Dali melting clock — but obviously, without hard drive parts.