A dead hard-drive is still useful

So my new Macbook Pro’s hard-drive corrupted itself over the weekend. Lost a fair amount of unbacked-up work I’m ashamed to say. But rather than mourn the dead, I figured I’d have some fun with a corpse (so to speak…)

(ex)hard-drive rotary controller/turntable from owmtxy on Vimeo.

Its a really simple hack, just hook up some wire to the 4 copper pads under the platter, one acts as ground and any of the others act as your signal. Run it into the sound card and you’ve got a very low-frequency oscillator! In the above video I’m using the drive as a ring-modulator, and as a sample playback device with a [phasor~] and [lookup~] in Max!